Abstract: Objective To explore the gender difference in health seeking pattern of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients attending county tuberculosis dispensaries in rural area Hunan Province of China. MethodsA cross-sectional descriptive survey was conducted in 4 counties randomly stratified by economic status from 122 counties, Hunan, China. After obtaining informed consent, a consecutive sample of patients, aged 15 years and over, with smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis was interviewed. A pre-tested questionnaires were used in this study. ResultsA total of 318 patients with smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis was interviewed and completed questionnaire during the study period. Among the participants, 229 were male and the rest were female, with the average age of 38.2 years old. Only 5.4% of the respondents visited the local county tuberculosis dispensaries firstly at the onset of tuberculosis, while 33.3% of them initially chose to visit general hospitals and 54.8% to township clinics, village clinics or private practitioners. The typical health-seeking pattern of men tended to go to general hospitals while women, on the other hand, initial visited to a private practitioner or an attempt to practice self-medication. 24.8% of the respondents had visited temples and asked the Bodhisattva to cure their disease or visited traditional healers, as well as 34.9% had visited folk herbalists before they went to tuberculosis dispensaries, and women are more likely to believe folk healing than men. ConclusionsThere is a great need for better understanding of behavioral factors and gender aspects of tuberculosis control, particularly aspects that influence the likelihood for achieving equity in health services. The priority target population for TB health promotion should be the people who can not access TB information like female,low level of education and low social-economic status.

Key words: Pulmonary tuberculosis, Health-seeking behavior, Gender: Diagnosis