TB is Taking Our Children: Is Washington Noticing?

The world is rightly doing all it can now to fight the spread of H1N1 flu. I only wish it would do the same for tuberculosis.

My research at a clinical trial site outside Cape Town is finding TB infection rates of children at the highest levels ever recorded since the onset of TB chemotherapy in the middle of the last century.

By the time children enter school at age 5, 20 percent are already infected with TB. By the time they reach the age of sexual maturity, 13 years, 50 percent are infected. And between the ages of 24 and 28 -- the years of peak prevalence of HIV -- 80 percent are infected.

That's why what is happening in Washington now is so important to me, to all of those fighting TB in Africa, and really to all of us: No area of the world is immune from this contagious airborne infection, which passes on the wings of a sneeze or cough.

The Obama administration is working out its new Global Health Initiative, and we need help more than ever to fight this dual scourge of TB and HIV that is affecting children in my corner of the world from the day they are born.

These historically dangerous rates of TB infection bode ill for future TB control. While TB infections may remain dormant, certain triggers, such as HIV infection, awaken and launch TB microbes into destructive attacks on a person's body. When HIV and TB work in tandem, the result often is death. My great fear is that if these unprecedented TB infection rates are not reduced, then TB control will fail for the next generation of Southern Africans. Even as efforts to fight AIDS have begun to make inroads -- the US government has been the world's most generous donor and implementer of these programs --

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