[Epidemiology of tuberculosis in the world and Japan].

We report the epidemiology on tuberculosis in the world and Japan. From the "Global Tuberculosis Control 2010" of WHO, the estimates of the global burden of disease caused by tuberculosis (TB) in 2009 are as follow: 9.4 million incident cases (equivalent to 137 cases per 100,000 population), 14 million prevalent cases, 1.3 million deaths among HIV-negative people and 0.38 million deaths among HIV-positive people. Most cases were in the South-East Asia, African, Western Pacific regions (35%, 30%, 20%, respectively). In Japan, new registered cases of TB in 2009 were 24,170 (equivalent to 19.0 cases per 100,000 population). The numbers of patients under 79 years old were decreased, but the numbers of patients over 80 y.o. increased, so the patients over 70 y.o. were over half of new registered cases. About 80% cases of TB patients were pulmonary tuberculosis, the numbers of culture-positive and smear-positive patients were 15,635 (equivalent to 12.3 cases per 100,000 population) and 9,675 (equivalent to 7.6 cases per 100,000 population), respectively. The rates of any drug-resistance and MDR-TB were 13.0% and 0.8%, respectively.