THE Ministry of Health and Child (MoHCC) will soon be commence training of healthcare workers across the country’s 62 districts to test for Tuberculosis (TB) in children using stools, as the country intensifies efforts to reduce the growing burden of Childhood TB.
By Michael Gwarisa
The development comes in the midst of indications that the country’s Childhood TB cases have been on an upward trend over the years while some have been missed largely due to failure by healthcare workers to detect TB children as children detecting TB in children has always been a challenge in Zimbabwe’s healthcare because young children are unable to cough up sputum samples unlike adults. However, through the new development, healthcare workers will be testing stool for tuberculosis DNA from swallowed sputum.
Public Health Specialist in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, National TB Control Program, Dr Fungai Kavenga told a Stop TB Partnership Zimbabwe meeting of Celebrities and TB Champions that the new innovation would reduce the number missed pediatric TB cases.
In terms of childhood TB, in 2020, children contributed 4% of the notifications. This is not good enough because we know ideally, children should contribute about 10% of the cases. TB is a communicable diseases this means children can be contact TB patients. Children don’t produce sputum like adults. That means you need to collect other specimens such collecting 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. Remember I said children swallow their sputum. So we collect their stool and run a test on the gene expert machine and if they have TB, we can pick it. SO this is an innovation that we are rolling out. In the next few weeks, we are doing to have a training in all the districts in the country for the use of still and how they can collect stool and use it to test for TB,” said Dr Kaveya.
He added that they are also going to roll out training around the country’s 62 districts on childhood TB.
“We have quite a number challenges in terms of picking up TB in children and one the challenges is that our health workers are not well trained in making a diagnosis of TB in children. I should make it clear that it is more difficult to make a TB diagnosis in 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.
“Symptoms in children overlap other health problems that we find in children and that makes it very difficult to diagnose TB in children. 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.
Zimbabwe has multiple required childhood TB policies and guidelines; however, gaps remain.
