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The University of Maine community was notified of a single incident of tuberculosis March 20. While the person infected has been treated, the Maine Centers for Disease Control is investigating if anyone else on campus might be at risk of infection.
The number of people who might be at risk on campus is “extremely small,” according to the university, but anyone the Maine CDC is concerned about will likely be contacted sometime during the week, first by e-mail and then by written letter. The unnamed individual has been treated and is recovering. Maine CDC staff members are interviewing the person to determine whom he or she came into contact with recently.
“They actually go through a set procedural process . they’ll have to interview the person of interest, and then they will see where that person’s been, and then they will go from there,” said Richard Young, director of Cutler Health Center. “Once that’s completed, we should have a relative size [of the group to contact].”
The university found out about the infection on Thursday; the Maine CDC was notified the week before. The person who contracted the disease was not hospitalized, but received antibiotics.
“On occasion there are concerns about illnesses in the community, and we’ve worked with the Centers for Disease Control in the past,” said Joe Carr, director of University Relations.
Young hopes to have the investigation finished before or by March 28.
“It can be a rather extended process of evaluating a case patient,” said Anne Sites, program director of infectious disease epidemiology at the Maine CDC.
People who may be at risk will be given skin tests. If the test is positive, it doesn’t mean they are infectious, it means they have simply come into contact with tuberculosis, Sites said. Only people who have come into close contact with the infected person for an extended period of time have any risk of being infected, Site said, adding that the treated person is no longer infectious.
Both Young and Sites declined to speculate on how many people might be at risk.
“University communities are somewhat unique in this regard because we have a highly dense population in a finite space,” Carr said.
Tuberculosis is an airborne bacterium that usually attacks the lungs, but can go after any part of the body. It was once the leading cause of death in the U.S. during the early 1900s.
Bangor Daily News