Tuberculosis remains one of the major diseases afflicting children throughout the world. The
World Health Organization (WHO) recommends tuberculosis disease screening in children who live in the
household of a smear-positive case, but lack effective measures for this management in high-burden
countries to perform this routinely. WHO has recently called for more studies to define the global
epidemiology of childhood tuberculosis, because the literature remains scant, dominated primarily by
studies from industrialized countries and South Africa, but few epidemiologic studies of pediatric
tuberculosis have been published from Asia. Children account for 10-15% of all new cases of tuberculosis
worldwide. For a long time, childhood tuberculosis was neglected because of the paucibacillary
characteristic of the disease in pediatric population. However, recent works have reinforced the role of
childhood tuberculosis as an indicator of the effectiveness of control-programmes and also in the
dissemination of the disease, since prevalent cases may persist for a long time. This chapter will focus on
epidemiologic parameters related to childhood tuberculosis, including risk factors associated to disease
development, the extrapulmonary tuberculosis epidemiology and the limitations in children tuberculosis
diagnosis, which impairs the correct evaluation of the impact of tuberculosis in childhood community.
Keywords: Childhood Tuberculosis, Epidemiology, Risk Factors, Extrapulmonary Tuberculosis, Drug-
Resistant Tuberculosis.
