Health outcome · disease
Tuberculosis
Part of: Respiratory infections
Also: TB, pulmonary tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis
A bacterial infection of the lung transmitted between people through the air, and one of the few indoor questions where the pathogen, the ventilation of the room and the susceptibility of the host are all part of the same evidence.
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Why it matters indoors
Tuberculosis is the classic airborne infection: the organism travels in droplet nuclei small enough to remain suspended for hours, and transmission happens where people share air for long periods — households, wards, prisons, dormitories. The rate at which a room replaces its air is therefore part of the disease’s epidemiology, not a comfort question, and the ventilation guidance for healthcare settings was written largely with this organism in mind.
The second route is susceptibility. Household studies find higher tuberculosis risk where cooking is done on solid fuel, and the proposed mechanism is the same one that connects smoke to pneumonia: particles impair the alveolar macrophages that would otherwise contain the infection. The association is less consistent than for pneumonia, and confounding by crowding and poverty is hard to remove, since the households that burn wood are also the households where people sleep close together.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | other 97 (50–99.9) | university students and staff (outbreak contacts) · university classroom | outbreak investigation with a contact cohort: 27 tuberculosis cases and 1665 contacts in underventilated university buildings in Taiwan, indoor CO2 measured before and after ventilation engineering, incidence of TB among contacts analysed with adjustment for contact investigation and latent TB infection treatment | F-0444 Effect of ventilation improvement during a tuberculosis outb… (2020) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | — | university students and staff (outbreak contacts) · university classroom | outbreak investigation with a contact cohort: 27 tuberculosis cases and 1665 contacts in underventilated university buildings in Taiwan, indoor CO2 measured before and after ventilation engineering, incidence of TB among contacts analysed with adjustment for contact investigation and latent TB infection treatment | F-0445 Effect of ventilation improvement during a tuberculosis outb… (2020) | machine |
| Dampness and water damage | OR 2.4 (1.1–5.0) | children · dwelling | case-control study of 234 children in Durban, South Africa: children diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis compared with children without, caregiver questionnaires on house characteristics and household air pollution, PM10 measured in a subset of homes (n = 105) and NO2 (n = 82), remaining homes modelled, logistic regression | F-0596 Jafta Association of childhood pulmonary tuberculosis with exposur… (2019) | machine |
| Carbon monoxide (CO) | OR 4.64 (1.1–20.7) | adults living with HIV · home | case-control study among adults living with HIV: 24-hour time-weighted personal carbon-monoxide exposure and time spent cooking against pulmonary tuberculosis, with adjusted odds ratios by exposure quintile | F-1023 Katoto Household air pollution and risk of pulmonary tuberculosis i… (2024) | machine |
| Solid fuel | OR 1.08 (0.62–1.87) | — · home | case-control study of tuberculosis: the household cooking and heating fuel, the smoke removal arrangement and the place of cooking compared between cases and controls | F-1718 Indoor solid fuel use and tuberculosis in China: a matched c… (2011) | machine |
| Solid fuel | OR 1.04 (0.54–2.02) | — · home | case-control study of tuberculosis: the household cooking and heating fuel, the smoke removal arrangement and the place of cooking compared between cases and controls | F-1719 Indoor solid fuel use and tuberculosis in China: a matched c… (2011) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Tuberculosis. Coridum Knowledge G-0143, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0143/