The costs and outcomes of paediatric tuberculosis treatment at primary healthcare clinics in Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

These results are the first reported estimates of paediatric DS-TB treatment costs in SA and show the potential cost savings of closer adherence to national treatment guidelines. The findings were robust in sensitivity analyses and are lower than previous cost estimates in adults.

Pattern and Outcome of Childhood Tuberculosis Seen at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Nigeria

“…It is possible some extrapulmonary TB cases may have been misdiagnosed. The commonest extrapulmonary Tb found was TB adenitis, which is also similar to the report of a previous study [7].…”

“…Our findings are similar with those of Affusim et al [6] who reported that 78.6% of the TB cases found were pulmonary TB and extrapulmonary TB accounted for 21.4%. It is also similar to the 92% pulmonary TB reported by Budgell et al [7]. Though Ogbudebe et al [8] also found more pulmonary TB compared to extrapulmonary TB, the proportion of their pulmonary TB was quite low (58.0%) compared to ours and their extra pulmonary TB was much higher (42%) than ours.…”

“…The 58.41% treatment success rate (combination of those who completed treatment (53.46% and those who were cured 4.95%) recorded in this study is low compared to the 83% and 79.2% treatment success rate reported by Ogbudebe et al [8] and Adejumo et al [36] respectively in Nigeria, 89.8% reported by Budgell et al [7] in South Africa and 69.6% reported by Aketi et al [31] in Kinshasa. The possible explanation for our low treatment success rate is the high rate of default and transfer (30.67%) recorded in our study, compared to the 1.1% -15% default rate recorded in these other studies.…”

“…Previous studies [7] [8] [36] reported that type of TB, HIV status, sputum microscopy result [7], clinical methods of diagnosis [8] and age [35] were associated with successful and unsuccessful treatment outcome. However, our study showed no such association and this is difficult to explain.…”

Tuberculosis among School Age (6 - 18 Years) Children Seen in University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital: A Need for Effective School Health Services

“…HIV co-infection is said to be the most powerful risk factor for progression from TB infection to active disease due to progressive weakening of the immune system [13].This study revealed a TB/HIV co-infection rate of 35%, which is higher than the 14.9%, 29% and 22.7% in three previous studies in Nigeria [6] [14] and South Africa [15]. Rivers State was the state with the highest HIV prevalence (15.2%) in 2012 (the period under consideration in this study) and states in South West Nigeria had very low prevalence rates, ranging from 0.2% to 4.3% [16].…”