Clinical Study Effectiveness of the First Dose of BCG against Tuberculosis among HIV-Infected, Predominantly Immunodeficient Children

Copyright © 2015 Joaquim C. V. D. Van-Dunem et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The objective of this study was to estimate the protective effect of Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine against tuberculosis among (predominantly immunodeficient) HIV-infected children in Angola. A hospital-based case-control study was conducted with 230 cases, children coinfected with tuberculosis, and 672 controls, HIV-infected children from the same hospital, aged 18 months to 13 years. The presence of a vaccination scar was taken as a proxy marker for BCG vaccination. The crude effectiveness was 8 % (95 % CI: −26 to 32) and the adjusted effectiveness was 30 % (95 % CI: −75 to 72). The present study suggests that BCG does not have a protective effect against tuberculosis among immunodeficient HIV-infected children. Since BCG is no longer given t