Children with TB at risk of dying amid slow progress on child-friendly treatment

By Astrid Zweynert LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than half a million children who fall ill with tuberculosis each year are at risk of dying because of a lack of child-friendly treatments, experts said. Tuberculosis, which kills more than one person every 20 seconds, is much harder to detect in children than in adults because they do not always show the typical symptoms, such as coughing, night sweats and blood in the phlegm or spit. "A huge number of children are suffering and dying from TB because the majority of efforts to fight the disease have focused on adults, so children with TB have become invisible," said Mercedes Becerra, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, United States. "And even if they get treatment, we lack reliable diagnostic tools and child-friendly medicines, which hinders effective treatment and can even fuel drug resistance," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview. March 23, 2015 at 08:00PM

via Lazahealth.org