Washington: A new research has revealed that the number of children suffering from tuberculosis (TB) annually has doubled since 2011 even after the improved medication and the successive efforts by the governments.
According to research, around 32,000 children suffer from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually.
Notify that 24 March had been observed as World Tuberculosis Day, with an aim to build public awareness about the global epidemic of tuberculosis and efforts to eradicate the disease.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston have estimated that around one million children suffer from TB annually- twice the number previously thought to have tuberculosis and three times the number that are diagnosed every year, the researchers claimed.
Ted Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at BWH said, “Despite children comprising approximately one quarter of the world’s population, there have been no previous estimates of how many suffer from MDR-TB disease.”
Cohen, who is also an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health added, “Our estimate of the total number of new cases of childhood TB is twice than estimated by the WHO in 2011 and three times the number of child TB cases notified globally each year.”
According to co-author Mercedes Becerra, an associate professor at HMS, “TB in a child is recognised as a sentinel event. It tells us about ongoing transmission and missed opportunities for prevention.”
In order to obtain these estimates, the researchers used several sources of publicly available data and devised a new method to correct for the chronic under-diagnosis that occurs in children, using conventional TB tests which were designed for and work best on adults.
The researchers used two models to calculate both the regional and global annual incidence of MDR-TB in children.
Their findings indicate that around 1,000,000 children developed TB disease in 2010 and of those, 32,000 had MDR-TB.
The research has been published in the prestigious journal The Lancet which emphasises the urgent need for expanded investment in the global response to TB and MDR-TB in children.
Bureau Report
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