A humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, has rolled out a project to tackle the underdiagnosis of Tuberculosis (TB) among children
MSF is an NGO premised on providing medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare.
The project rolled out by MSF aims at increasing the number of children diagnosed with TB as well as improving their treatment experience and preventing new cases.
"Recent WHO recommendations on the diagnosis of TB in children can be a game changer to increase the number of children diagnosed and put on correct treatment," said the head of MSF's tuberculosis working group Cathy Hewison in a statement on Monday.
Over 600 children under the age of 15 die from Tuberculosis (TB), according to statistics from UNICEF.
96 per cent of the children who die from tuberculosis never accessed treatment.
This pushed MSF to start an initiative dubed "TACTiC" for “Test, Avoid, Cure Tuberculosis in Children”.
TACTiC is supporting projects in implementing the new WHO recommendations in over a dozen countries in Africa and Asia.
The initiative aims to contribute to knowledge-building through several multi-country studies on the validity and feasibility of the recommendations while advocating for their widespread implementation and the development of better tools to diagnose TB in children.
They provide clinicians and TB programs with the confidence to decide to treat TB in children using clinical signs and symptoms without relying on results of laboratory tests or X-rays if they are not available or when the test results are negative.
TACTiC is not only about improving the diagnosis of TB in children but also about the treatment and prevention of TB in this vulnerable age group.
WHO has made it easier to protect children in these circumstances from becoming sick, by recommending short three-month treatments for prevention in this vulnerable group.
TACTiC also aims to increase knowledge and access to these treatments.
"The TACTiC project aims to help MSF projects and teams, particularly those not specialized in the management of tuberculosis, initiate the implementation of the new WHO recommendations and use their experience to foster further scale-up within MSF and beyond," Hewison said.
“It would be preferable to have simple, reliable, inexpensive, and easily accessible diagnostic tests to detect TB in children,” said Hewison.
“However, to date, these do not exist, therefore we are also advocating for a massive increase in resources for research and development of new and adapted tests to diagnose TB in children”.
