Referring to the case of the nurse with active TB Dr Lawrence Budnick, from UMDNJ said
The outbreak of latent TB infections at a hospital in NYC several years ago resulted from a nurse who answered no to all the questions on 8 symptom surveys over 11 years and then became symptomatic with TB disease
The case was reported in
MMWR
Eleven years earlier, nurse A had LTBI diagnosed with a TST result of 15 mm induration during screening for employment at hospital A, after emigrating from the Philippines. She had elected not to take the isoniazid prescribed for treatment. The reason nurse A gave for declining treatment was that most adults from the Philippines, where TB is endemic, have positive TST results and generally do not take treatment for LTBI. She also stated that the positive TST result might have been caused by her bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination for TB disease at birth or potential exposures while she was employed as a nurse in the Philippines. Nurse A had an annual TB symptom screen on eight other occasions and had one other chest radiograph (when she began work in a different area of the hospital) without evidence of TB disease.
