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 Some 155,000 children with TB are set to benefit across 18 countries
that have already ordered the new medicines and are preparing to
roll them out, starting with Kenya, according to the TB Alliance
campaign group that oversaw their development.
"Now, with the appropriate treatments, we can make rapid progress in
finding and treating children with TB so we can achieve a TB free
generation," Kenya's health minister Cleopa Mailu said in a
statement on Tuesday.
The improved formulations come in the correct doses for children,
are fruit-flavored and dissolve in water, making them easier for
children to take.
Previously, caregivers had to cut or crush multiple, bitter-tasting
pills to give children the correct dose every day for six months,
contributing to treatment failure and death.
TB killed 140,000 children and 1.37 million adults in 2014 and
infected a further one million children, World Health Organization
(WHO) data shows, but a lack of market incentives hindered the
development of drugs for children, the TB Alliance said.
TB is spread by bacteria when someone with untreated TB, often a
family member, coughs or sneezes. Children who survive can become
blind, deaf, paralyzed or mentally disabled.
The child-friendly drugs are the first products to meet the WHO's
2010 guidelines for childhood TB treatment, with funding from
UNITAID, which is hosted by the WHO.
"No child should die of TB, yet for too long, we have not had the
medicines to mount a sustainable response against childhood TB,"
UNITAID's director of operations, Robert Matiru, said in the
statement.
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Kenya is a high burden TB country, with nearly 7,000 cases reported
in infants and children in 2015. Children under five have the
greatest risk of severe infection and death.
When TB patients do not complete their treatment, they fall ill
again, often with hard-to-treat drug-resistant "superbug" strains
that are rapidly gaining a foothold globally.
TB testing and treatment is free in Kenyan public health facilities
but it is often underdiagnosed or confused with other pediatric
illnesses.
(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property
rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more
stories.)
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