Brooklyn, NY: Tests Find Student Exposure to TB After Teacher Falls Ill

A teacher at Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic elementary school in Brooklyn contracted TB and may have infected a student, the city’s Health Department said. Forty-four other students at the school tested positive for exposure to the disease but did not have active cases, the department added.

The 44 children who tested positive were being treated with preventive antibiotics and have only a 1 percent chance of developing active TB, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the health commissioner. Frieden added that the only person who has a contagious form of the disease is the teacher, who has not been in the school since June. Therefore, he said, no additional people were infected between August and October.

The Rev. William A. Smith, pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, said that the Health Department notified the school in mid-September that the teacher had TB but asked the school not to publicize it. “We didn’t like that,” he said. “We weren’t totally pleased with the idea, but that’s the protocol of the Health Department.” The late-October round of testing was announced to parents in a letter earlier in the month, Frieden said. And on Thursday, the department held a meeting for parents in the school. Many parents were not satisfied with the answers they got, and about 20 parents came to the school Friday morning to demand answers, Smith said.

The Health Department’s assistant commissioner for TB control, Dr. Sonal Munsiff, said that because TB is not immediately detectable by tests, it was not appropriate to begin testing for TB before October, and it would have created “unnecessary anxiety” to tell parents about the outbreak before that. “We have found that if we give premature information to students we create more problems,” she said. “So our protocol -- and it has been tested very well for several years -- is that there is a certain time frame in which we will notify parents. Really, there has not been any delay.”

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