A patient at Overland Park Regional Medical Center has tested positive for tuberculosis, potentially exposing some health care workers to the disease.

The Kansas and Johnson County departments of health and environment issued a joint statement Wednesday saying “this situation has potentially affected a limited number of OPRMC staff and patients and (the Johnson County health department) believes the risk of transmission is extremely low.”

Officials said the infected patient was in isolation and responding well to treatment.

“A thorough contact investigation began immediately to determine anyone who may have been exposed to the patient,” said Dr. John Romito, chief medical officer at the Overland Park hospital. “People, including staff and patients, who need to undergo testing in the next week have already been contacted.”

 

About 40 Kansans per year test positive for tuberculosis, down from an average of 80 in years before 2004, said Phil Griffin, the state’s tuberculosis controller at KDHE.

Griffin said 65 percent of Kansas TB cases are found in foreign-born individuals, from countries where tuberculosis is still endemic. Those individual aren’t necessarily new arrivals.

“We have people who have been in the country for 20 or 30 years that develop TB because they came in with the infection from their home country. That’s one of the challenges with tuberculosis is that it can lie dormant forever. Only 5 to 10 percent of those infected with tuberculosis will ever develop the disease,” Griffin said.

“We’ll also see it in the elderly in their 70s, 80s, 90s — and those may very well be Kansas-born people who have been carrying the infection since they were children. When they were children, there were no treatments for TB, so they may have been exposed…and carried that infection all these years. As their immune system breaks down because of their elderly age, then the disease develops.”

Potentially lethal, tuberculosis is spread through the air by coughing, laughing, singing and sneezing. The only way to contract the infection is by prolonged contact in close proximity to a person who has TB. It cannot be spread through casual contact or by contact with someone’s clothing or eating utensils.

Symptoms include cough persisting more than three weeks, unexplained weight loss, night sweats, chills, fever, coughing up blood, fatigue and/or blood in the urine. TB can be treated and cured with up to nine months of antibiotics, Griffin said.—KHI News Service