Search

A group of sixteen children suffering from osteoarticular tuberculosis were seen over the past five years in the Belgrade Paediatric Surgery Clinic. This disease is now extremely rare and effects chiefly children born outside maternity departments and not receiving BCG vaccination at birth for different reasons. The osteoarticular tuberculosis rate in the Socialist Republic of Serbia over this period was thus one in 500,000 children. The disease is three times as common in male children, most often affecting the hip and presenting above all at about the age of nine. At the time of admission, eight children had tuberculosis lesions affecting the lungs, visible and active or latent, partially or completely. In five children, one of the parents was receiving treatment for active pulmonary tuberculosis at the time of onset of the disease. Conservative treatment (immobilisation, tuberculous bacteriostatic therapy and general measures) was used in fifteen children and only one underwent surgery, in addition to the standard treatment described. In only one child, there was ankylosis of the hip and the end of treatment, the others having less sequelae of returning completely to normal. In one girl, osteoarticular tuberculosis was complicated by exsudative tuberculosis pericarditis.