Abstract:

Objective A multi-dimensional analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) government website tuberculosis (TB) issue record, reflecting the British government’s policy force and focus of TB prevention and control was conducted to provide reference for the TB prevention and control in China. Methods Web crawler operation in Python, a computer programming language, was carried out in UK government website (www.gov.uk) and 1530 records on TB were obtained. After deleting duplicate records, all the 1530 records and 331 records with high policy-relevance were analyzed, respectively, in terms of topics, types, and publishing authorities. Then, 113 bovine TB records and 111 human TB records were analyzed on content or keywords with high frequency, respectively. Results Of all the 1530 records, the top 3 topics were “Health and social care” (n=281), “Entering and staying in the UK” (n=144), and “Environment”(n=136), “guidance and regulation” (n=364) had the largest number of document types. The main type of 331 records with high policy relevance was “Guidance and regulation” (n=111), mainly found in year 2013 (n=31) and 2014 (n=30). During the same period, the number of TB cases reported in Britain (especially non-British-born population) significantly decreased. Among the 113 bovine TB records, the most mentioned infected animal species was “badger” (n=24). A total of 579 keywords were labeled in 111 human TB records and 24 keywords with high frequency were clustered into 3 topics, including TB prevention and control strategy (n=10), TB epidemiology (n=8), and TB clinical technology (n=6). Conclusion The focus of the UK government’s prevention and control of TB included the prevention and control mode of “external input” for the immigrant group, the comprehensive treatment of zoonosis combined with the concept of “the same health”, and the strengthening of multi-sectoral and multi-level joint action on social and economic factors. The concept and strategy of prevention and control provided a useful reference for China.

Key words: Tuberculosis, Health policy, Bibliometrics, Statistics as topic