title: Lessons learned from two school tuberculosis investigations.
abstract: We describe the results from tuberculosis (TB) contact investigations of two high-school students. Following the development of active TB in two foreign-born students, contact investigations were performed to detect contacts with active TB disease or latent TB infection (LTBI). The two students developed pulmonary TB within 2 years of immigrating to the United States. Among household contacts, no case of active TB was identified; however, LTBI was identified in 7 of 20 persons screened (35%). Of the 104 high-risk school contacts identified, no cases of active TB disease were found, but 7 (9.3%) were diagnosed with LTBI. An additional 683 low-risk contacts were screened and 9 (1.5%) were positive. Schools and Public Health departments needs to be prepared for outbreak investigations and should screen only persons with a high risk of exposure to the index case with active TB in an attempt to identify secondary infections. Those persons with a low risk of exposure should not be screened.
authors.affiliation: Department of Internal Medicine, The Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. Shu-Hua.Wang@osumc.edu
authors.forename: Shu-Hua
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: W Garrett
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Hunt
authors.forename: Dwight A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Powell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D016358:Contact Tracing / Q000379:methods*; D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009161:Mycobacterium / Q000302:isolation & purification; D009820:Ohio / Q000453:epidemiology; D015397:Program Evaluation; D012574:Schools; D014376:Tuberculosis / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000208:ethnology / Q000503:physiopathology