daniel chigunwe
Rumbidzayi Zinyuke
Senior Health Reporter
Zimbabwe has renewed its commitment to eliminating tuberculosis in children as part of a broader national strategic plan to end TB entirely by 2030.
TB among children continues to be under-reported and often goes untreated as a result of challenges faced in the diagnosis of children due to limited tools and lack of capacity by healthcare workers.
Last year, Zimbabwe was among the countries the reckoned children should contribute 10 percent of the TB notifications between 2023 and 2027. In 2022, children contributed six percent of the total notifications and seven percent in 2023, below that 10 percent mark, suggesting that childhood TB was more under-reported than adult TB.
At the United Nations high-level meeting for TB held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last year, President Mnangagwa pledged that the country would improve the TB notification for children before the next UN high-level meeting in 2027.
Speaking at a feedback meeting held yesterday, acting deputy director TB prevention and control in the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Fungai Kavenga said the Government already had in place measures to eliminate TB among children.
“The Government through the Ministry of Health and Child Care national TB control programme has a national strategic plan that is in place and there is focus on eliminating TB in children. There are a number of strategies in that plan, including adoption and use of new tools and innovations such as the use of stool for diagnosing TB in children, expanded use of chest x-ray in children and capacity building for health care workers,” he said.
He said another hurdle identified was the stigma and discrimination surrounding TB and the Ministry had launched communication and advocacy campaigns to raise awareness and encourage parents and caregivers to seek medical attention for children suspected of having TB.
The Government was also training health care workers to bring them up to speed with what had to be done to speedily diagnose and treat children.
Dr Kavenga emphasised the need for increased domestic resources to fund the TB response.
“There are a number of initiatives that we can do as a country and one of them is engaging the private sector and already we are implementing the public-private partnership framework where we are engaging various private players to come on board and this alone can increase domestic resources.
“We now have a political commitment to end TB in Zimbabwe by 2030 and so this will come with increased resources from the fiscus,” he added.
Zimbabwe was among the countries that in 2018 set six targets towards the elimination of TB: increased TB case detection rate, childhood TB notifications, drug-resistant TB notifications, TB preventive therapy targets for people living with HIV, preventive therapy for contacts under the age of five, and preventive therapy targets for the above five contacts.
The country however failed to meet five of the six targets in full.
Jointed Hands Welfare Organisation executive director Dr Donald Tobaiwa said the Covid-19 pandemic and the limited capacity for the detection of childhood TB had been major contributors to the failure to reach most of the UN 2018 targets.
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