LAHORE:On World Tuberculosis (TB) Day observed on Tuesday, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) urged governments and international donors to bring children to the heart of the global TB response and commit to providing sustained investments to diagnose, treat, and prevent TB in children, who remain one of the most vulnerable groups.
No child should suffer or die from a disease that is both preventable and treatable, it said. MSF is presently running the Test, Avoid, and Cure TB in Children (TACTiC) project aiming to innovate TB care for children by implementing the latest WHO recommendations.
The project covers 12 countries with a high burden of TB and where MSF provides TB care for children: Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.
WHO report highlights that in 2024, 685,000 children under the age of 15 were reported with TB, out of an estimated 1.2m who had TB.‘In an already underfunded TB response, children are pushed further to the back of the line when services are disrupted by aid cuts, conflict, or displacement’, said Cathy Hewison, TB platform lead, MSF.
‘The tools to diagnose and treat children with TB exist, even if imperfect, yet only half of the children who have TB are diagnosed or treated.’ As per WHO’s 2025 Global TB report, 1.2m children and adolescents aged less than 15 years old fell ill with TB in 2024. The report revealed that a staggering 43 percent of children under 15 years old missed TB diagnosis and could not access treatment in 2024, a statistic that has not improved from previous years.
The situation is worse for children with TB below 5 years old, with only half of them accessing TB diagnosis and care. The volatile combination of interruptions in TB services as a result of recent cuts in international financing of TB programmes and a record number of displaced people in TB high-burden countries is expected to result in even more children remaining undiagnosed and untreated.
An efficient way to diagnose TB in children under 10 years old is by using the WHO-recommended treatment decision algorithms – these are guided scoring systems that allow healthcare workers to diagnose TB based on clinical symptoms alone (in combination with an X-ray, if available), or when laboratory tests are unavailable or appear negative.
Based on recent MSF research conducted in 5 African countries (Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Uganda), the use of the WHO algorithms can nearly double the number of children who can be diagnosed with TB and subsequently started on lifesaving treatment. Implementation of the WHO algorithms in routine care in MSF-supported health facilities is showing a significant increase in the number of children diagnosed with TB.
Every missed sign and every delayed decision pushes children with TB closer to severe disease and death. Greater political will and investments from governments and international donors are urgently needed to ensure lifesaving tools for preventing, diagnosing, and treating TB are available to all children.
