Please note, I am under the care of a physician and plan to seek medical attention as recommended by my physician.
This week, I went for a physical to begin my new job position. Part of that was a TB skin test. You know, that little needle under the skin with the little bump? Well, I’m off today to get mine read and it looks like a tiny little reddish bruise, about the size of a pencil eraser, which is exactly like a photo I Googled for a positive TB skin test.
I’m freaking out, absolutely FREAKING OUT, because the Newbaby is here, and the thought that I could have something which could possibly infect him is killing me. Aside from the fact that I have absolutely no clue when I could have been exposed to TB. I don’t do anything, other than breathe, which is high risk. No foreign travels, no IV drug use, no hanging out at nursing homes or hospitals, no malnutrition, no smoking or alcohol abuse–nothing. Further Googling indicates that since I have no symptoms of TB, it may be latent TB, which means I’m not infectious…but still… I go this evening to have my skin test read, so I have all day to mull this over in my mind and feel like the worst person in the world at possiblity having exposed my 4 month old grandson to TB…
Anyone else ever had a positive TB test? Had the chest x-ray? Went through treatment?
When I was psych nursing we had a TB ward. To nurse on the ward you had to have a positive Mantoux test…the little skin prick had to produce a reaction, indicating that you had acquired immunity to TB or you had to have a BCG. I had several before I was allowed to work on the ward.
Anyhow the story then was that you wanted to get a positive test result. It meant you had already been exposed and were immune. Unless of course you were some recent immigrant from a third world country.
IANAD, but I can pretty emphatically say that the first thing you should do is not freak out.
First off, telling positive from negative PPD’s is somewhat more difficult than one might imagine. If you’re at the early side of the 48-72 hour window there can still be redness and irritation from the injection without a raised bump that isn’t a positive.
Even if you do have a positive PPD, it may or may not mean that you’ve ever been exposed to tuberculosis. Suffice to say, there are reasons for false positives.
After that, even if you really have been exposed to TB, the important thing is that you aren’t showing symptoms right now, and a chest x-ray will help you objectively say that you aren’t experiencing active TB.
Following that, you’re fortunate to live in a developed nation with a relatively good medical infrastructure. Although TB is very rare here, the MDR and XDR TB strains you hear about on the news and probably come across through Google are exceedingly rare. It’s almost certain that your doctor will be able to provide you with drugs to effectively treat your TB both for your own health and the health of others around you.
Again, don’t freak out.
If your PPD comes back positive, the people that placed it will be able to guide you to the next steps. You won’t be out there alone with just the SDMB and Google to consult. The chance of you dying Edgar Allan Poe style of the consumption is effectively nil.
Yes, I’ve tested positive when I was about 12. My step mother contracted TB (probably when she visited Kenya when she was younger) and developed full blown TB that required medication and isolation. Everyone who had had contact with her had to be tested and mine came back positive, and the xrays confirmed that I had experienced TB but had fought it off.
So, chances are you actually have had TB at some point in the past but never realised. As Don’t Ask said, it happens to a lot of people.
You can contract TB just by being in close quarters with infected people. A crowded bus ride every day with an infected person can do it. My understanding is that treatment is much better today and not the long dragged out quarantine situation of yesteryear.
My ex’s father had it. He lived in a TB sanitarium for something like 11-12 years. I’m pretty sure we’ve made great strides and this should not be something to fear today. Here’s an interesting site: http://www.aidsetc.org/aidsetc?page=cm-523_tb
It’s hardened and raised. it feels like a callous.
I’m not freaked out so much at the thought of treatment for me, but the fact that all my holding, kissing and cuddling with Newbaby the past two weeks could have negative health effects for him.
After spending a season as a night monitor in an emergency shelter for homeless folks, I decided a TB test would be prudent, what with me having smoked heavily for 35 years and all.
The most common comment from people I mentioned it to was: “Why?”, as if I had done something incredibly stupid!
The test site swelling measured 7mm diameter the day of the reading, indicative of TB. I was sent for a chest x-ray, (I utilized the Health Dept. so I wouldn’t have to pay for anything) and I was diagnosed with LATENT TB.
In order to please the Health Department (and receive my letter of “successful treatment”) I had to take isoniazid once a day for nine months. The antibiotic was significant enough to warrant a liver panel prior to, and 30 days into taking the drug. No drinking either - not a concern to me, but a HUGE deterrent to homeless folks that rely on alcohol for comfort or alcoholism.
If required to have a TB test for employment or other purposes, I must have a chest x-ray since I will always test positive for the Mantoux PPD.
It makes for a moment of amusement watching the expressions when you tell folks “I have Tuberculosis”.
Don’t panic, take the meds you’re directed to take and learn all you can. There’s plenty of info on the web.
My aunt and grandma have both had positive TB tests. They were both told that it’s not uncommon for the skin prick tests to produce positive results from people who grew up in rural communities and drank unpasteurized milk. My aunt and most of my grandma’s family were small-time farmers who grew up in a little village. In the 1930s, when my aunt was growing up 40% of cows were infected with M. bovis. They practically had milk straight from the cow when they were growing up. My dad ws born after they’d moved to a larger city and never drank unpasteurized milk and has never tested positive for TB.
As far as I know, neither my aunt nor grandma had ever been ill with TB, they just had the anti-bodies from having been exposed to bovine TB. Although, if I recall correctly, my aunt’s x-rays showed some mild scarring which suggests she may have had some TB at some point in her life, but clearly it wasn’t severe because no one remembers her being sick as a child.
And none of her children have ever been sick or tested positive for TB.
I personally know two health care workers, with direct patient contact (one pediatric nurse, one tech), who show positive Mantoux TB tests and thus need yearly chest x-rays instead of the yearly Mantoux to show that they do not have the disease. Neither of them ever had TB that they knew of, but were probably exposed enough that their immune systems reacted to it and fought the disease off, and now continue to react to testing.
I “react” enough to the Mantoux to have my first (pre-employment) test be misinterpreted as positive by one of the nurses. The nurse who was called in to re-evaluate it stated it wasn’t actually positive. Our pre-employment testing called for two Mantoux tests, a week apart I think, and my second wasn’t interpreted as positive either. Now on my yearly tests I will sometimes have the spot continue to look red and somewhat raised for a long time afterwards, but it goes away - I think the longest time anything was visible was a month or longer. Other times it disappears pretty quickly. (So my body’s quirky, what else is new?)
You will probably need to have a chest x-ray. You might not even have latent TB or anything wrong at all. It’s highly possible that you were just exposed enough to get your immune system all worked up over it. Please don’t get yourself all worried over something like this.
Having a bump is NOT enough to make it a positive. The bump has to be a certain size. In the descriptions of protocols currently in use in the Spanish medical system, the size that’s considered a positive depends on the patient’s general health: someone with general good health needs a bigger bump than someone HIV+ who in turn needs a bigger bump than someone who’s already had HIV±linked illnesses. In those same protocols and due to the ridiculous amount of positives in the Spanish population, a positive is always followed by an X-ray; if the X-ray comes out clean you’re fine.
The test does NOT indicate that you have TB. It indicates that your body recognizes a substance produced by the TB bacterium; that is understood to indicate that your body has been in contact with the bug and knows how to fight it. If your white cells have been succesful, you won’t have TB. If your white cells haven’t been succesful, you will have TB.
There was a case last year, where two kids (cousins, immigrants from an Eastern European country reputed for its bad healthcare) in a Spanish school, in a region where public healthcare is managed at the regional level, came down with TB. The whole school (about 400 people including students, teachers and support personnel) got tested for TB, but also, since there are protocols to run general health checks in schools every four-five years and that school was due the following year, they moved them up and gave everybody the X-rays, vision checks, hearing checks etc which are part of the general health check. The way the person from the healthcare department explained it, they were running the TB test first because that’s what WHO protocol says you have to do, but they weren’t planning on starting treatment on anybody until the X-rays came through. They did ask people to avoid any travel while testing was under way, including to nearby villages, visits to the family and so forth.
I’ve had the tuberculin test done three times, tested positive twice, lungs are just fine.
I had the test and came back as having been exposed to TB. I had a chest X-ray and that came back negative. I took an antibiotic once a day for six months. The doctor told me after that I never have to worry about TB again.
It was no big deal. As I understand it TB is only a danger if you a person who won’t take the full course of the antibiotic which causes the TB to come back and this time be resistant to that antibiotic.
Lots and lots and lots of people have positive TB tests. If doesn’t necessarily mean (and in fact, very rarely does mean) you have anything to worry about. About 25% to 30% of employees here have +PPD history… nothing to worry about until they start coughing.
(I’m not licensed for jack shit, but I work in Employee Health of a hospital, which includes TB tests and symptom questionnaires for employees.)
Tuberculosis is a sneaky disease in that it can lie dormant in the body for many years - being held in check by the immune system so you don’t actually have symptoms, but waiting for its chance to come to life if you become weak or immunocompromised.
If it turns out you do have TB, it’s better to find out that you have it now when you’re asymptomatic, so you can get treated while you’re still strong and healthy, than to only find out when TB comes on in full force while you’re in a sickly or weakened state.
The treatments we have nowadays are vastly more effective than they were during the sanitarium days of old (at least for now, until antibiotic resistant strains become more widespread thanks to the inevitability of some people with the disease acting like boneheads). If it does turn out that you do have TB, just make sure you’re compliant with the treatments.
I tested positive in the first grade. They never did figure out why. The only result was that I had to be retested every year. One other kid also had to be tested every year, because she had spent her early years drinking unpasteurized milk.
Relax. Neither you nor your baby are going to die like Mimi in La Boheme.
It’s something that your doctor needs to look at but, as others have said, it’s not something to freak out about.
I had a 12 mm positive TB result this year as part of tests for immigration.
It’s a legally notifiable disease so the testing doctor had to inform the state health department. They told me to see my GP which I did and he sent me to a pulmonary specialist who decided that there was nothing to worry about since my chest x-ray was clean and I don’t have any symptoms. He also wasn’t concerned that I volunteer in a nursing home for an hour a week (helping the residents play bowling ).
I did some reading at the time and it may have been the result of the TB vaccination (BCG ?) we all got as kids in New Zealand. The doctors said maybe but it’s not certain enough to draw that conclusion. I also have vague memories of a former girlfriend telling me about a family member with TB so … who knows.
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