45 More Infants Exposed To TB At Texas Hospital
EL PASO, Texas (AP) - Health officials say an additional 45 infants may have been exposed to a West Texas hospital worker infected with tuberculosis, bringing the total number of children potentially exposed to the disease to 751.
The El Paso Department of Public Heath said Tuesday that it received a list of another 45 infants at Providence Memorial Hospital in El Paso. Authorities have said the infants were exposed to the worker from September 2013 to August.
More than 350 appointments have been made for babies to be tested, officials said. The families of the 45 infants are being notified. Last week, the health department announced more than 700 infants and 40 employees had been exposed to the disease.
Norma Hernandez, the mother of a 9-month-old boy exposed to TB, says her trust in the health care system is shattered. "I'm afraid to even bring him to the doctor because now I don't know whether he'll be exposed to something else," she said at the parking lot of the El Paso Department of Public Health, where children are being tested for tuberculosis.
Health officials say the hospital employee tested positive for TB late August and was placed on leave. They are testing all those potentially exposed as far back as September 2013, three months before the worker exhibited the first symptoms of the disease. Citing privacy laws, the hospital has not said why it took so long to test this person.
Lee B. Richman, founder of the New Jersey Medical School Global Tuberculosis Institute in Newark, says very few people get infected because it takes a lot of exposure over long periods of time to be infected. "Seven hundred is a large number, but I'd bet the house very few are infected."
David Dowdy, assistant professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that often about 1 percent of those exposed become TB latent, which is to say they have the illness in their body but do not develop it and cannot transmit it. From those who are latent, between 5 percent and 10 percent develop the active form of the disease.
At least twice in the past Providence Memorial Hospital submitted correction plans for deficiencies to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Once in 2011, it failed to perform a psychosocial assessment on a patient who later committed suicide and in 2012 it failed to correctly administer drugs to a patient and keep adequate records.
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