Volume 23, Number 3—March 2017
Research
Mycobacterium tuberculosis Transmission among Elderly Persons, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, 2009–2015
Figure

Figure. Twelve small tuberculosis (TB) clusters (2 cases each) among a total of 22 clusters with epidemiologic links between patients, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, 2009–2015. Ovals and diamonds represent individual cases, by patient age group, in each cluster; numbers inside symbols are patient identification codes. Ovals indicate cases with an indistinguishable 24-loci variable-number tandem-repeat typing profile optimized for Beijing family M. tuberculosis strains (24Beijing-VNTR profile); diamonds indicate cases with a single-locus variant profile. Vertical arrows and dotted lines between cases within a cluster indicate linked and possibly linked cases, respectively. Transmission settings for linked cases are shown within rectangles. Case notification dates and patient disease sites are shown above/below the case symbol; P+ and P− indicate pulmonary smear–positive and –negative cases, respectively. Blue dots indicate confirmation of the epidemiologic link by in-depth contact tracings after 24Beijing-VNTR typing. Asterisks indicate clusters that began with a TB source patient who was >60 years of age. An expanded version of this figure is available as Technical Appendix 1