I have a teacher who has inactive tuberculosis. My mother recently needed to be tested for tuberculosis in order to become certified as a teacher, and asked the doctor about my teacher. The doctor claimed that later in life, I will probably get a false positive test for tuberculosis.
This just doesn’t seem right. I mean, it might make sense if I still see the teacher on a regular basis, but why would her condition still affect me later in life?
“Inactive TB” is NOT contagious. In theory, though, it might conceivably become active before anyone is aware of it and thereby infect people.
Semantics are key here. If the TB is truly “inactive”, it could reactivate (later in life or when the immune system is weakened). If the TB was properly treated, however, it will NOT reactivate.
So, it depends on what you mean by “inactive” - do you mean literally inactive or do you mean properly treated? Even inactive TB, though, in an otherwise healthy young person is extremely unlikely to reactivate.
Bottom line: I think the doctor is wrong or was misquoted.
I realized that I never explained one other thing.
If your teacher’s TB reactivated, you could get infected by him. But, being young and healthy yourself, your body would almost certainly inactivate the TB before you even knew there was a problem. You might then have inactive TB (or you may have completely eradicated the bug, in which case it’s not inactive, it’s gone). Regardless, since your body had been exposed, you’d get a positive TB skin test.
Her inactive TB was properly treated. Is there any way I could get a false positive on a TB test just from being around her, even if she doesn’t give me TB?
My understanding of inactive TB is that while the bacteria is in your body, it is dormant because your immune system is keeping it in check (similar to herpies). That means that there is no live bacteria floating around in the person’s blood stream (or lungs in the case of TB). Now, if that person was to become immunocompromised for some reasion (stress, etc…) then the bacteria may again begin to reproduce if they are not being treated. This is similar to people who get cold sores when they are stressed out.
So, as long as your teacher’s TB is inactive, there is not any live bacteria in her lungs, and you shouldn’t ever pop a positive test.
You can also test positive on the skin test if you’ve been exposed to bovine TB. This is common in people who have consumed unpasteurized dairy products (such as farm kids of past generations).
People may carry the TB germ (be infected with TB) for long periods of time, but have no symptoms at all and cannot spread the germs to anyone else.
Most people infected with bovine TB will never get sick from the TB germs. The positive skin test means they need to go for more thorough testing because the skin test can’t tell the difference between human and bovine TB and/or how recent (or ancient) your infection may be.
My mom is one who tested positive for TB. She got a hest x-ray and they said “yup, at some point in her life she had been infected with TB” though had never been sick. Then they asked her is she’d ever lived on a farm. The doctors weren’t particulalry worried, apprently there are a lot of folks my mom’s age who grew up in rural areas and test positive for TB from drinking unpasteurized milk. I’ve since found out that several of my friends’ parents (from rural areas) have also tested positive for TB in the past.
In general for a person to get infected with the human TB, you’d have to spend an extended amount of time in an enclosed spacw with someone who has an active case of the disease, and lots of TB organisms in their lung secretions as they cough and spray these critters into the air.
Ew.