Background
TB, death, ®, HIV infection, Tuberculosis
HIV INFECTION, DISEASE, TUBERCULOSIS
Tuberculosis is one of the top ten causes of death in children worldwide [In children, the laboratory-based diagnosis of TB is particularly challenging due to the paucibacillary nature of the disease and the difficulty to obtain respiratory samples for bacteriological confirmation [Major advances in the diagnosis of TB in the last decade include highly specific, semi-automated nucleic acid amplification tests, Cepheid Xpert® MTB/RIF test and Xpert® MTB/RIF Ultra test, (Cepheid, USA; referred to as Xpert and Xpert Ultra) to detect Due to this evidence, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends Xpert and Xpert Ultra as the initial diagnostic test for TB and rifampin resistance in children, and further recommends the use of LF-LAM to assist in the diagnosis of TB in CLHIV [The objectives of this study were (i) to determine the rate of HIV infection among children under age five with presumptive and confirmed pediatric TB diagnosis; (ii) to describe the characteristics of children with HIV in terms of clinical presentations, pathways to TB diagnosis and TB treatment outcomes, and (iii) to compare them to those of children not living with HIV. As HIV status was associated with a shorter time from symptom onset to TB diagnosis in preliminary analysis, we assessed which other co-variates also demonstrated an association with a shorter time to diagnosis. We then confirmed if the effect of HIV infection remained in multivariate analysis.