Incidence of Tuberculin Reactors in a Series of 2,000 Patients Seen in a Private Practice of Internal Medicine

1) The over-all incidence of reactors to tuberculin was 55.6 per cent among 2,000 consecutive patients seen in our practice of internal medicine.

2) The incidence among the 1,221 females was 53.5 per cent and among the 779 males it was 58.9 per cent.

3) The average incidence of tuberculin reactors among persons from 20 to 89 years was 59.9 per cent, and those from 0 to 19 years was 13.8 per cent. The younger the individual the less likely is he to be a reactor to tuberculin.

4) The tuberculin test is an important, single diagnostic procedure to discover those infected with tubercle bacilli.

5) The high number of tuberculin reactors in this group is because of the fact that many of these patients were being studied because of lung disease, and yet here the tuberculin test proved to be a most valuable rapid screening method to exclude the presence of tuberculosis.