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U.S. News
Tuberculosis Affects Children More Than Previously Thought
New Study Says About One Million Kids Under 15 Contract Disease Every Year
March 23, 2014 6:31 p.m. ET
A doctor attends to a child infected with tuberculosis at a hospital in Kotawa, India.
AP
About one million children world-wide
under 15 years old contract tuberculosis every year, twice as many as
previously thought, according to a new study from researchers from
Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
About
32,000 of those children have drug-resistant strains of the airborne
disease, according to the study, published Sunday night in the Lancet
journal.
TB experts have struggled to
pinpoint the burden of the disease in children, because it is difficult
to diagnose with standard methods used on adults. TB also affects
children differently; as many as 30% who get it may develop the disease
in parts of their body other than their lungs, doctors say.
The
study is the first to estimate the burden of drug-resistant TB in
children, a growing concern among pediatric TB specialists as
difficult-to-treat strains spread around the world.
The
authors used several sources of data to derive their estimates, basing
them in part on the proportion of children whose TB is believed to be
missed with a test using a patient's sputum.
Using
a different methodology, the World Health Organization estimates that
about 530,000 children develop TB every year. But WHO and other public
health officials say estimates and the methodology for producing them
are still evolving. The first pediatric TB estimates were developed only
about three years ago.
Public-health
officials have traditionally focused their fight against TB on adults,
because they are known to be infectious, while children were believed
not to spread it. But the thinking has changed as drug-resistant TB has
spread and as it has become clearer how sick children can get after
contracting the disease.
Children
become very ill quicker than adults once they are infected, and their TB
is a sign of infection or disease in adult family members and others
around them, said Mercedes Becerra, associate professor of global health
and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-senior author of
the study. "These one million children are missed opportunities for
preventing TB every year," she said.
Having
accurate numbers for the pediatric TB epidemic is critical for funding
purposes, said Jeffrey Starke, a pediatric TB expert at Texas Children's
Hospital in Houston who didn't participate in this study. "People
interested in child survival and the Millennium Development Goals are
going to look for what diseases are causing most morbidity and mortality
in the world," he said.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com
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