Health Service Delays in Diagnosis and Treatment among Tuberculosis Patients in Kelantan, Malaysia

[...]this study was aimed to determine the prevalence of health service, diagnosis, and initiation delay and to identify the factors influencing the unacceptable health service delay. [...]delays in diagnosis may worsen the course of the disease and even increase the case fatality rate9, 10, n. In Malaysia there was an evolution in the TB control programme to achieve the goal above. The comparison for diagnosis delay was difficult to be made since many studies 7, 23, 24 were done at the hospital level which measured the delay starting from patient's admission to the hospital. [...]the median diagnosis delay found in these studies was shorter than our finding that was measured from the health clinic level. The natural history of the disease is those patients who are initially sputum negative may later become sputum-positive. [...]these patients would not be considered as TB until the disease advanced and repeated sputum examination turned out to be positive.