Over the past few years the Kenyan government has significantly scaled up its diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis with positive results, but officials say diagnosis of children lags behind.
Kenya ranks 13th out of the UN World Health Organization’s (WHO) 22 high TB burden countries and has the fifth-highest in Africa. There are an estimated 12,000 TB-infected children younger than 14, representing 11 percent of all infections.
“It is extremely difficult to diagnose tuberculosis in children, unlike in adults, and the low knowledge among many health workers of the symptoms of the disease in children means many children die,” said Joseph Sitienei, head of the National Leprosy and TB Control Programme. “Even among children where it is detected, it is done late, meaning they are enrolled late on treatment.”
WHO recently said many cases of pediatric TB went undiagnosed or were diagnosed incorrectly, raising children’s risk of TB meningitis, which has harmful long-term effects and high mortality.
Kenya’s government has released guidelines to health workers on checking for symptoms of TB, especially among children born to HIV-positive mothers.
“It is the main reason the government has now embarked on training and sensitization of health workers on effective pediatric tuberculosis diagnosis,” said Sitienei.
Julia Masiga, a 31-year-old HIV-positive mother of five, says she nearly lost a child because a health worker failed to spot TB.
“My child was coughing most of the time… she had fever also but when I went to the clinic, they said the child had pneumonia and they gave me drugs,” she said. “I believed it because she had been vaccinated [against TB] when I gave birth to her. She was taking her medicine but this pneumonia they were telling me about was not going away.”
Eventually her child fell so ill she had to be admitted to Mbagathi District Hospital in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi; it was there that Masiga was finally told her child had TB.
“Now she is taking her medicine and doing better; I am very happy that even though I thought she might have HIV, she doesn’t,” she said.
Read more of the story here at the IRIN news service:
KENYA: Stepping up paediatric TB diagnosis
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