Healthcare workers to undergo training to test TB in children

H-Metro Reporter
THE Ministry of Health and Child Care will soon start training healthcare workers across the country to test for Tuberculosis (TB) in children using stool.

The country is intensifying efforts to reduce the growing burden of Childhood TB.

This development comes in the midst of indications that the country’s Childhood TB cases have been on an upward trend over the years.

Some cases have been missed largely due to failure by healthcare workers to detect TB in children.

The Public Health Specialist in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, National TB Control Programme, Dr Fungai Kavenga, said the new innovation would reduce the number of missed paediatric TB cases.

“In terms of childhood TB, in 2020, children contributed four percent of the notifications, and this is not good enough because we know ideally, children should contribute about 10 percent of the cases,” he said.

“TB is a communicable disease.

“This means children can contact TB patients and children don’t produce sputum like adults.

“This then means you need to collect other specimens, such as gastric specimens because when children cough, they swallow their sputum isn’t it?

“We now have this innovation whereby you can use stool to diagnose TB in children.

“So, we collect their stool and run a test on the machine and if they have TB, we can pick it.

“This is an innovation that we are rolling out.

“In the next few weeks, we are going to have training, in all the districts, in the country about how they can collect stool and use it to test for TB,” said Dr Kavenga.

He added they were also going to roll out training around the country’s 62 districts on childhood TB.

“We have quite a number of challenges in terms of picking up TB in children and one of the challenges is that our health workers are not well trained in making a diagnosis of TB in children,” Dr Kavenga said.

“I should make it clear that it is more difficult to make a TB diagnosis in a child as compared to an adult and there are a number of reasons.

“Children don’t necessarily have cardinal symptoms of TB like coughing, fever, night sweats and loss of weight.

“For childhood TB, we now have childhood-friendly TB medicines in the country and this is a very big achievement because remember, children were using adult tablets.”