Mycobacterial Diseases
Open Access

Abstract

Cost of Tuberculosis in Childhood

Reka Bodnar, Laszlo Kadar, Akos Somoskovi and Agnes Meszaros

Background: Cost of management of tuberculosis (TB) has high expenses from both patient and health insurance perspective.

Methods: A systematic review on cost analysis of TB in children was executed in Ovid-MEDLINE for the period 1991-2011. Search terms were tuberculosis, cost and childhood. Review articles, commentaries, letters were excluded.

Results: The first search resulted 156 articles, after linguistic and content screening 16 articles were considered for further analysis. The topics related to the cost-analysis were latent tuberculosis infection, BCG vaccination, cost-effectiveness of TB control program, TB screening, extrapulmonary TB, TB in resource rich and resource poor countries.

Conclusion: After processing the results of the articles, it was identified that tuberculosis screening among schoolchildren and kindergarteners as well as BCG revaccination is not cost-effective in low-burden countries.