Patients who continue tobacco smoking after successful treatment of TB often develop TB again called recurrent TB. In a study published in April 2014 issue of the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease the researchers followed a large sample of fully treated 5,567 bacteriologically confirmed TB patients in Taiwan. Of those patients, 1.5% developed a recurrent TB. Regular tobacco smokers were twice as likely to develop recurrent TB compared with former smokers or people who had never smoked tobacco.
Regular tobacco smokers were defined as individuals who smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day. Another study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (2015; 93:390-399) concluded that smoking is an independent risk factor for poor TB treatment outcomes. The study reported that Georgian patients whose sputum samples had been found culture-positive for MDR…
