More children suffering from tuberculosis

Every year nearly one million children contract tuberculosis

24/03/2014

Tuberculosis continues to be a health risk that should not be underestimated worldwide, despite the success in curbing this often fatal infectious disease. In particular, due to the increasing spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogens threatening to reverse the positive trend of recent decades, report scientists Harvard Medical School (Boston) on the occasion of World Tuberculosis Day 2014 in the journal „The Lancet“. For the first time, the researchers carried out a calculation of the worldwide prevalence of tuberculosis in children under the age of 15, concluding that significantly more adolescents are becoming infected than previously thought.

„Although children under the age of 15 account for more than 25 percent of the world's population, the worldwide incidence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in children has never been quantified“, the researchers report to Dr. Mercedes Becerra from the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Therefore, in two computer models, taking into account the specific risk of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the scientists calculated the probable number of infections in children under the age of 15 years. „After applying these calculated risks, we estimated that around 999,792 children developed tuberculosis in 2010“, write Becerra and colleagues. 31,948 children had suffered from infection with multidrug-resistant pathogens, the researchers continue.

Significantly more tuberculosis infections in children than assumed
According to the co-author of the study, Ted Cohen from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, the computer-calculated numbers for new tuberculosis infections in children are about twice as high as the World Health Organization's (WHO) figures In 2011, the gap was even greater for the total number of tuberculosis infections in children under the age of 15 years. Above all, the growing prevalence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis diseases, in which the bacterial pathogens no longer respond to at least two common antibiotics, should be particularly critical here.

More than one million tuberculosis deaths per year
The infectious disease tuberculosis is caused by bacteria of the genus Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which usually infest the lungs. Symptoms of active tuberculosis are WHO's coughing, sometimes with sputum or blood, chest pain or chest pain, general weakness, weight loss, fever and night sweats. In 2012, 8.6 million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis and 1.3 million died as a result of the infection, according to the WHO. More than 95 percent of deaths occurred in low and middle income countries. According to WHO estimates, around 530,000 children became infected with tuberculosis in 2012. However, the calculations presented by the US scientists show that they were in fact probably almost twice as many. (Fp)

Picture: Aka