A million children develop TB annually: study

Around one million children suffer from tuberculosis (TB) annually - twice the number previously estimated, scientists have found.
Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School estimated the number of childhood tuberculosis cases at 1 million annually, which they say is three times the number that are diagnosed every year.
The researchers also found that around 32,000 children suffer from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually.
"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," said Ted Cohen, from BWH's Division of Global Health Equity and co-senior author of this study.

"Our estimate of the total number of new cases of childhood TB is twice that estimated by the WHO in 2011 and three times the number of child TB cases notified globally each year," said Cohen, who is also associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health.
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 estimate 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.

"Our findings demonstrate that there is a need for improved methods for collecting data on childhood TB.
"A good starting place would be improved diagnostic methods for children and more systematic collection of information on how many children are suffering with this disease," said Helen Jenkins, from BWH's Division of Global Health Equity, and lead statistician on the project.
The findings are published in The Lancet journal.