Ensuring the regular intake of drugs to achieve a cure of tuberculosis is as important as the initial diagnosis of the disease. Kerry Munday explains why community nurses need to understand patients’ attitudes and cultural beliefs when attempting to adopt effective methods to reduce the risk of noncompliance with treatment

The impact of the acquired-immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic has made tuberculosis an increasing worldwide problem. One of the major obstacles to tuberculosis control is patient adherence to treatment. Discontinuous chemotherapy or ingestion of some, but not all, components of a multi-drug regimen enhances the likelihood of acquired drug resistance and relapse of disease. Relapse is uncommon in the UK (0-3 per cent of cases) if there is good compliance with treatment (1); there has been only one reported outbreak of multiple drug resistant TB reported here (2).