College in screening alert after students diagnosed with TB

Teachers and students at a Scottish college are being screened for tuberculosis after two cases of the disease were diagnosed by health officials.

NHS Forth Valley said that two students on the same college course had contracted TB. The patients affected both attend Forth Valley College’s Falkirk campus.

NHS Forth Valley said a 20-year-old man from the Lothian area and an 18-year-old man from the Forth Valley area had the disease and the cases are thought to be linked.

Both individuals are currently receiving treatment and neither are infectious, the health board said.

Screening for TB has been carried out on the immediate families of the two men, whose identities have not been revealed.

NHS Forth Valley also said teachers and students who go to the same classes at the college are also being screened as a precaution, but a spokeswoman was unable to say how many were involved in the screening.

Advice and information on TB will be passed to the wider college community to make sure that staff and students are aware of the symptoms, the board said.

Health chiefs yesterday stressed that the risk of infection was low. Dr Jennifer Champion, consultant in public health medicine at NHS Forth Valley, said: “There are around 400 cases of TB in Scotland every year and the vast majority are successfully treated with antibiotics.

“TB is not easily passed from person to person and therefore the risk of infection among people who have been in close contact with a case is low.”

Tuberculosis usually affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body.

Symptoms include a cough, loss of appetite, unexplained weight loss, fever and/or sweating, especially at night, tightness of the chest or chest pain.

While the infection is not easily passed from person to person, it can be spread when someone with TB coughs or sneezes and another person breathes in the bacteria.

Health experts say that prolonged contact is normally needed for the infection to be passed, but people can be in close contact with someone but still not contract TB themselves.

The latest development comes two months after it emerged that three members of a Lanarkshire family were being treated for TB.

Screening and advice were offered at a Blantyre nursery where one of the patients worked and at a hospital where another received treatment.

Martin Donaghy, medical director at Health Protection Scotland, said: “TB is still an uncommon disease in Scotland. Last year we had 500 cases notified to us, which makes Scotland comparatively a low incidence country in Europe and the world.

“But the concern about it is that the numbers are going up. It went up by just under 5 per cent last year and that is an upward trend. So we are seeing more TB.

“The numbers are relatively stable in the indigenous population, but we are seeing an increasing number of cases in people who are born outside the UK and come into Scotland to live.”