Denver Public Health officials investigating a tuberculosis case at Metropolitan State University of Denver are tracking and testing about 100 contacts of the infected student, but say they are not concerned about an outbreak.
Dr. Robert Belknap, director of the Denver Tuberculosis Clinic at Denver Health, said tuberculosis of the lungs is spread through prolonged contact — breathing shared air — with someone who is sick and symptomatic. It is not spread through casual contact, shaking hands, sharing food or drink, or by touching common surfaces.
People who haven’t been directly contacted by health officials have nothing to worry about, Belknap said.
“It takes weeks of treatment to comfortably say that a person with active TB is no longer contagious, but it takes months of treatment to cure the disease,” Belknap said. “It can take a long time, and patients can really suffer.”
But anyone who has just contracted the disease — diagnosed through a skin or blood test — can be treated and cured before symptoms develop, Belknap said.
Symptoms include a cough lasting more than three weeks, heavy night sweats, loss of appetite, weight loss, chest pain, chills, weakness, fatigue and coughing up blood.
Yet many people with dormant TB can have it for decades without symptoms, he said.
“Most people who get infected have no symptoms and don’t even know they have it,” Belknap said.
Those most likely to become very ill with TB, Belknap said, are the elderly, people with underlying health issues and impaired immune systems.
In Colorado, TB rates are lower than the national rate, and each year 60 to 70 new cases develop in the state, most in the Denver metro area. A handful of Coloradans die from TB every year, Belknap said.
“There is still some stigma attached to TB,” Belknap said. “There’s a tendency to blame the person who’s sick.”
Nationwide, the incidence of TB in 2012 was three cases per 100,000 population, compared with fewer than two cases per 100,000 people in Colorado that year.
TB will be considered eliminated when incidence reaches one case per 1 million. In Colorado, that would mean four to five cases a year.
Electa Draper: edraper@denverpost.com
