Abstract: Objective  To understand the situation of TB epidemic in prison and the status of prevention work.  Methods The pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) census and questionnaire investigation were performed for all the prisoners, and sputum smear, sputum culture, bacterial identification and drug susceptibility test (DST) were done for prisoners with abnormal chest radiograph shadow or suspicious symptoms. Besides, the infectious source homology analysis was made for culture positive patients through Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number of tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing method. The prevalence of tuberculosis in prison was calculated and compared with the general population.  Results  A total of 40 cases were diagnosed as PTB, of which one was sputum smear positive, one was culture positive (same with the smear positive), five were smear negative and culture positive, and 34 were smear negative and culture negative. The DST results for six culture positive patients showed that, there are three drug-resistant cases, among which, one was streptomycin-resistant, one was resistant to isoniazid, rifampicin and ethambutol simultaneously, one resisted to isoniazid, rifampicin, ethambutol and ofloxacin. The prevalence of PTB, smear positive, culture positive were 1156.4/100 000（40/3459）, 28.9/100.000（1/3459）, 173.5/100 000（6/3459） respectively. The PTB prevalence in prisoners was higher than that in local residents(χ²=17.858, P<0.01).The total awareness rate for three pieces of core TB information was 61.6%（6384/10 359）， while 67.4%（4737/7026） for the B prison，49.4% （1647/3333）for the A prison. The difference was statistically significant (χ²=309.1，P<0.01). In addition, the homology analysis showed that the infectious sources of the five culture-positive patients in the same prison were different.  Conclusion  The TB epidemic in prison is serious, so the effective prison TB control working model should be explored.

Key words: Tuberculosis,pulmonary/prevention and control, Prisons, Wuhan city