Countries with large numbers of immigrants and detailed surveillance systems can provide information about inequalities of the distribution of tuberculosis in the world as this example from Canada shows.
The differences in the risk of developing tuberculosis are large depending on the country of origin. The difference between the countries of origin with the lowest rates (here Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg) and those with the highest (the Philippines and China) are almost 30-fold.
However, a direct extrapolation to the tuberculosis situation in the country of origin is not justified, as immigrants belong to a selected group from that country.
