Because within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis diversity complicates diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis (TB), we measured diversity prevalence and associated factors among 3,098 pulmonary TB patients in Lima, Peru. The 161 patients with polyclonal infection were more likely than the 115 with clonal or the 2,822 with simple infections to have multidrug-resistant TB.
Keywords: ClassTR; MIRU-VNTR; Mycobacterium tuberculosis; Peru; TB; antimicrobial resistance; bacteria; classifier of tandem repeats; drug susceptibility testing; multidrug-resistant TB; mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units–variable number of tandem repeats; polyclonal infection; strain diversity; tuberculosis; tuberculosis and other mycobacteria.