Surveillance of drug resistance in tuberculosis (SDRTB4) software
To assist in the process of collection and analysis of data, WHO has developed a software system called SDRTB (Surveillance of Drug Resistance in Tuberculosis). When SDRTB was planned it was decided to prepare a system which:
- would be simple to construct and use and so not require the long development cycle typically required for the preparation of a complex or sophisticated software programme
- could be distributed on a single diskette or CD-rom to participating countries and centres
- would be available at no cost
- would easily permit information from several local or national areas to be merged into regional and global data sets so that broad trends as well as local ones could be analysed
While the software can be used to import data for a survey of any design, it should not be used to analyze data collected in a survey that used a cluster sampling design or that had a significant amount of data missing in the course of a survey. In such cases, analysis using Stata, R, or other statistical programmes is needed to execute multiple imputation (to account for missing data) and logistic regression with robust errors (to account for sampling design effects).
The current version of SDRTB software (SDRTB4) has been developed using FileMaker Pro™ and uses a standard Windows interface. SDRTB4 is made available through WHO as a compiled run-time application which can be legally distributed at no cost.
An option in SDRTB4 allows data from FileMaker Pro™ (.FP5 format) files to be exported to dBase (.DBF format) files which in turn can be imported into, manipulated and further analyzed by EpiInfo, Excel, Access, or by commercial statistical software packages such as SAS, SPSS or STATA.
Previous versions of SDRTB software have been prepared with the DOS versions of Epi Info, public domain software for data management and analysis widely used throughout the world in public health programmes. These DOS versions can be used on older PCs running DOS or Windows 3.1, but also on modern generation PCs running Windows 95, 98, or NT. SDRTB3 and SDRTB4 are available from WHO at no cost.
A "User's Manual"; is also available for SDRTB4.
For copies by email or by post, contact us at: TBDRS@who.int