Speakers, including health experts, at a round table discussion said on Tuesday that tuberculosis infection among children in Bangladesh was increasing.

Diagnosing and treating TB in children is challenging because many parents are not aware of the disease, they said, adding that since the symptoms are similar to other illnesses, doctors often do not recommend TB tests initially. 

Non-government organisation Nari Maitree along with the United Nations Office for Project Services organised the discussion titled ‘Involved Media in Dissemination TB and CRG-related Information to the Mass Population’ in the capital. 

In her presentation, Nari Maitree project coordinator Tauhida Sultana said that according to a 2022 global report, 99,040 children under the age of 15 died of TB in Southeast Asia.

In Bangladesh, there are 221 TB patients in every one lakh people, and 24 out of every one lakh die from the disease, Tauhida said.

She mentioned that TB is a significant contributor to morbidity and mortality among children under the age of five. 

Farzana Zaman, the divisional TB expert at Dhaka Division National Tuberculosis Control Programme at the Directorate General of Health Services, said that in Bangladesh, one person was infected with TB every minute, and one person died from the disease every 12 minutes.

Around 44,000 people died of TB in the country in 2023, compared to 29,000 deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic so far, she said, adding that TB can be diagnosed in any part of the body except nails and hair.

She also noted that Bangladesh’s capacity to diagnose TB improved as there were only 20 machines for TB diagnosis in 2012, but now there were 833 machines.

The speakers stressed the importance of raising awareness about the symptoms, diagnosis, and prevention of TB among the general public to help eliminate the disease.

They noted that TB medicines were being produced in Bangladesh and were provided for free by the government.

Nari Maitree executive director Shaheen Akter Dolly and its director for health and nutrition Masuda Begum, and Bangladesh country lead to Global Health Advocacy Incubator Muhammad Ruhul Quddus also spoke at the discussion, among others.