The actual number of children infected with the deadly airborne tuberculosis (TB) is actually 25% higher than what is estimated by the World Health Organisation.
New estimates made public on Wednesday indicates that over 6.5 lakh children develop (TB every year in the 22 countries with a high burden of the disease (HBCs) like India - almost 25% higher than the total number of new cases worldwide estimated by WHO in 2012 (530000).
Research published in the Lancet suggests that about 15 million children are exposed to TB every year, and roughly 53 million are living with latent TB infection, which can progress to infectious active TB at any time.
What is worse is that the overall estimated case detection rate was 35% — meaning that 65% of active TB cases in children are missed every year by national TB programmes.
A 6-year-old TB patient in Kolkata. (Getty Images file photo)
This case detection rate is substantially lower than the WHO estimate of 66% in adults.
"Our findings highlight an enormous opportunity for preventive antibiotic treatment among the 15 million children younger than 15 years of age who are living in the same household as an adult with infectious TB", explains lead author Dr Peter Dodd from the University of Sheffield in the UK. "Wider use of isoniazid therapy for these children as a preventative measure would probably substantially reduce the numbers of children who go on to develop the disease".
A boy takes medicine for TB while another patient looks on at a hospital in New Delhi. (Getty Images file photo)
In contrast with standard estimates that are reliant on paediatric case reporting, which varies widely between countries, the researchers took a complementary approach, using mathematical modelling to estimate rates of infection and disease in children based on country-specific data on household and population structure, and the prevalence of TB in adults.
The findings show that about 7.6 million children younger than 15 years in the 22 HBCs became infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 2010 and of those, roughly 650000 developed TB.
According to Dr Dodd, "Children are an often ignored but important part of TB control efforts. In high-burden settings, childhood TB makes up a substantial fraction of the total TB burden. The estimated incidence is higher than the number of notifications, with under-reporting more common in younger children. Quantifying the burden of TB in children is important because without good numbers, there can be no targets for improvement, no monitoring of trends and there is a lack of evidence to encourage industry to invest in developing medicines or diagnostics that are more appropriate for children than those available today".
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