A model for interval-censored tuberculosis outbreak data.

As the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) has increased in the United States, occupationally acquired TB has increased among the health care workers (HCWs). This paper describes a model developed in response to the needs of an outbreak of multidrug-resistant TB. One of the goals of the outbreak investigation was to estimate the risk of tuberculin skin test (TST) conversion as a function of HCW job type and the period during which persons were employed over the study period. TST conversions were evaluated at periodic examinations and data are interval-censored. We present a generalized linear model that extends Efron's survival model for censored survival data to the case of interval-censored data.