Consolidated Guidelines

PICO question 1: TB screening approaches in children 10 years of age

Which screening tools should be used to screen systematically for TB disease in children aged below 10 years accessing health care?

a. In children aged below 10 years accessing health care in high TB prevalence settings, should systematic screening for PTB using chest radiography (CXR) be used against a composite reference standard?

A summary of the structure of the guidelines including a brief description of the contents is provided in Box 1.

The population of interest in these guidelines is children and adolescents, defined as:

Introduction

Children and young adolescents (aged below 15 years) represent about 11% of all people with tuberculosis (TB) globally. This means that 1.1 million children become ill with TB every year, almost half of them below five years of age. National TB programmes (NTPs) only notify less than half of these children, meaning that there is a large case detection gap (1).

Summary of changes to recommendations as included in the second edition of the Guidance for national tuberculosis programmes on the management of tuberculosis in children, 2014

This chapter includes valid WHO recommendations that apply to children and adolescents in special situations such as for the management of TB in the context of HIV infection or malnutrition and optimal feeding of infants of mothers infected with TB.

Table 7: WHO recommendations on models of TB care relevant to children and adolescents

Table 6: WHO recommendations on TB treatment relevant to children and adolescents

Table 5: WHO recommendations on diagnostic approaches relevant to children and adolescents