Leveraging nutritional rehabilitation and tuberculosis programmes to tackle tuberculosis and severe acute malnutrition in children

Each day more than 500 children younger than 15 years die from tuberculosis. Considerable progress has been made to control tuberculosis, but the impact on reducing the burden of childhood tuberculosis lags behind that in adults. A key barrier to decreasing morbidity and mortality associated with childhood tuberculosis is the paucity of accurate and feasible diagnostic tools for this population. WHO estimates that 58% of children younger than 5 years with tuberculosis are never diagnosed or reported.