26 infants may have been exposed to tuberculosis at Washington hospital

As many as 26 infants may have been exposed to tuberculosis (TB) at a Washington hospital, officials announced Wednesday. 

MultiCare Auburn Medical Center is notifying the families of those babies and another 27 adult patients that they could have come into contact with the respiratory disease anytime in the past five months after an employee tested positive. 

The hospital insists that its not likely that any of the patients or the employee’s co-workers contracted the disease, but is urging anyone who could have come into contact with the disease to get tested.  

Diseases like TB can be particularly dangerous to people with weakened immune systems. It’s not clear if the infants at Multicare had any such immunity issues. 

‘This situation is troubling to us but we are committed to ensuring TB testing and care for those who need it,’ said Dr Arun Mathews, Chief Medical Officer at MultiCare Auburn Medical Center. 

Between April and September, an infected employee of MultiCare Auburn Medical Center may have exposed 26 infants, 27 adult patients and 107 other workers to tuberculosis, the hospital announced Wednesday – though officials say transmission of the disease is unlikely

Tuberculosis was once one of the most lethal diseases in the 19th century, largely disappeared as sanitation and living conditions improved, but has been making a worrisome return in recent years.

Once called ‘consumption,’ the disease had claimed the lives of one in seven people that had ever lived by the start of the 19th century. 

It continued to plague Americans through the mid-50s, driving many to tuberculosis ‘sanatoriums’ in dry climates in the hopes that the crisper air would cure their wet, mucus-laden coughs (it didn’t, this theory was later proven erroneous). 

Tuberculosis caused by a bacterium transmitted in the tiny droplets of saliva cast into the air when sufferers cough or sneeze.  

It mostly affects the lungs, though other tissues can be impacted too. 

Signs of the disease include inexplicable weight loss, fever, chills, fatigue, night sweats and loss of appetite.  

Once it has invaded the lungs, it causes a chronic cough lasting three or more weeks, chest pain, and may cause sufferers to cough up blood. 

Infections remained common and chronic until two things occurred: Antimicrobial drugs to treat the disease were developed, and living conditions became much cleaner. 

As of 2018, about one percent of the world’s population was thought to be infected, though not all of them are symptomatic. 

In 2017, 9,105 cases of TB were diagnosed in the US.   

Although TB is transmitted in the same simple way as highly-contagious disease like measles and the flu, it typically isn’t contracted without prolonged exposure. 

That’s why it spread (and still does) so much more rampantly in unsanitary living conditions and was less communicable in the sanitary environments created at sanatoriums. 

Even if they are exposed to and contract TB, only between five and 10 percent of people who catch the germ will develop tuberculosis disease. Instead, the rest will harbor  latent but asymptomatic infection. 

This has meant that tuberculosis is now of relatively little concern in the US – although a few drug-resistant strains have begun to crop up in hospitals and, since the 1980s, cases have become somewhat more common as TB spread among immunocompromised people with HIV, growing homeless populations and other people with weakened immune systems. 

It’s unclear how the hospital employee might have acquired the infection but they came into contact with over 100 additional colleagues at the facility. 

Free tests are being offered and encouraged for all of those who the hospital has notified of possible exposures between April 22 and September 30.