Socioeconomic disparities and multidrug- resistant tuberculosis in South Korea: Focus on immigrants and income levels

Risk factors of MDR-TB remain unclear in South Korea, despite being an important public health issue. Findings from this study, which included >50,000 patients with TB from South Korea, suggests that immigrants and patients with lower income levels were strong pre-dictors of MDR-TB in a high-income, high TB incidence country.Copyright (c) 2022, Taiwan Society of Microbiology. Published by Elsevier Taiwan LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

Despite being an important public health issue in South Korea, the risk factors of MDR-TB remain unclear. This study, which included over 50,000 TB patients from South Korea, suggests that immigrants and patients with lower income levels are strong predictors of MDR-TB in a high-income, high TB incidence country.