Fruit-flavored drugs to cut child TB deaths

Children will be more likely to survive tuberculosis, the world's most deadly infectious disease, once new strawberry-flavored and raspberry-flavored medicines are available early next year, experts said on Wednesday.

TB killed 140,000 children and 1.37 million adults last year and infected a further 1 million children, according to the World Health Organization, but a lack of market incentives has hindered the development of drugs for children, the TB Alliance campaign group said.

Many children with TB do not complete their treatment because they have to take several bitter-tasting medicines every day for at least six months. The dosage is often imprecise as parents have to cut and crush adult-sized drugs for their children.

From 2016, soluble child-sized doses of the three major drugs used to treat TB will be available, helping to save lives.

"The child is really just drinking a fruit-flavored drink," the chief executive officer of the TB Alliance, Mel Spigelman, said.

"It will make it so much easier for a child and a parent or caregiver to make sure the child takes the treatment and takes it religiously for the full time."

When TB patients do not complete their treatment, they fall ill again, often with hard-to-treat drug-resistant "superbug" strains that are rapidly gaining a foothold globally.

About 32,000 children catch drug-resistant TB each year, and it is often fatal, according to US researchers.

TB is spread by bacteria when someone with untreated TB, often a family member, coughs or sneezes. Children who survive can become blind, deaf, paralyzed or mentally disabled.

Almost 10 million people were infected with TB in 2014 and 1.5 million died, surpassing the 1.2 million deaths from HIV/AIDS, WHO said.