TB in Chicken Plant in North Alabama
Contaminated chicken/turkey pot pies and TB…
October 11, 2007–Decatur, Alabama
About 160 workers at a Decatur poultry farm have been tested for tuberculosis after a former employee was diagnosed with active TB, a state health department official said.
The former employee, who was hospitalized and is being treated, left the Wayne Farms poultry plant several weeks ago.
Scott Jones said health officials initiated skin tests on the employees at the plant. Jones, interim director of the health department’s TB control divison, said they will return to the plant Friday to evaluate the employees’ reactions to the testing solution.
He would not name the former employee or say where he was hospitalized or where he resides.
Any positive results from Wednesday’s skin tests would only mean an employee has at some time been exposed to tuberculosis, Jones told The Decatur Daily in a story Thursday. Any Wayne Farms employees who test positive will receive lung X-rays on Oct. 16.
A person who tests positive for tuberculosis but has no symptoms is not contagious. To keep latent TB from becoming active, health officials usually administer a six-month course of isoniazid in pill form. Jones said the former employee was born outside the United States.
“Greater than 50 percent of cases reported nationally are among people born outside the U.S.,” Jones said. In 2006, 27 percent of the cases reported in Alabama were among people born outside the United States.
Wayne Farms spokesman Frank Singleton said the county administered skin tests to 80 employees who had worked in close proximity to the TB-infected former employee. The total number tested was higher than 80 because the county opened testing to all employees who requested it, he said. Tuberculosis is an airborne disease.
