UK parents warned on TB

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Parents of every schoolchild in a British city at the centre of a tuberculosis outbreak are to be sent information about the disease.

Leicestershire County Council said it was sending out letters to parents after the largest single outbreak of TB in the UK for 20 years was discovered at a school in Leicester, central England.

Health officials said on Thursday that 22 children and a teacher at Crown Hills Community College had been diagnosed with TB, along with three of the infected children's relatives.

Another 60 students were found to have possibly been infected.

"We are giving out the information so other schools and other parents feel they have been kept informed," a council spokeswoman said.

Leicestershire Health Authority is currently testing friends and family of those diagnosed with the disease to determine how far the disease has spread.

The authority said there would be a meeting of national experts from the Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre and the Public Health Laboratory Service on April 10 to decide whether this screening programme should be extended to the wider community.

Tuberculosis affects the lungs and is spread by coughing, sneezing or spitting. The disease can be fatal in small children but is usually treatable with antibiotics in adults.

Reported cases of TB, once a major killer in Britain, are on the increase again after a decline in the 20th century.

Provisional government figures said there had been 6,797 cases of TB in Britain in 1999, an increase of more than 10 percent from the year before, and up 34 percent since 1987.

The government recently announced it would resume the routine immunisation of schoolchildren against TB, which was halted in 1999 because manufacturing problems led to a shortage of the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine.

The government said it aimed to immunise all pupils aged 13 to 15 against the disease during the next academic year, which begins in September 2001.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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