Objective: This study aims to investigate the effect of country-level school life expectancy on Tuberculosis (TB) incidence to gain further understanding of substantial variation in TB incidence across Europe.
Methods: An ecological study examined the prospective association between baseline country-level education in 2000 measured by school life expectancy and TB incidence in 2000-2010 in 40 countries of the WHO European region using quantile regression. Subsequently, to validate the ecological associations between education and TB incidence, an individual-level analysis was performed using case-based data in 29 EU/EEA countries from the European Surveillance System (TESSy) and simulating a theoretical control group.
Results: The ecological analysis showed that baseline school life expectancy had a negative prospective association with TB incidence. We observed consistent negative effects of school life expectancy on individuals' TB infections prospectively.
Conclusions: These findings suggests that country-level education is an important determinant of individual-level TB infection in the region, and in the absence of a social determinants indicator that is routinely collected for reportable infectious diseases, the adoption of country-level education for reportable infectious diseases would significantly advance the field.
Keywords: Education; Epidemiology; Europe; Social determinants of health; Tuberculosis.