Tuberculosis testing for hundreds of children in Omaha began Saturday, after a large group of infants, toddlers and children was potentially exposed to infection through a drop-in day-care program.
More than 500 children need to be tested within the next week, local health officials said, and younger ones will be given preventive drugs. It’s an unusually large tuberculosis exposure of children, who are more vulnerable to the disease and can become very sick quickly.
“This is an urgent situation,” Justin Frederick, deputy health director in Douglas County, Neb., told reporters this week. The health department was preparing to declare a public health emergency.
Tuberculosis, which can be fatal, usually targets the lungs. It also can cause meningitis in children and affect organs outside the respiratory system. Such severe illness can generally be prevented by early treatment but can develop rapidly in infants and toddlers, Douglas County Health Director Lindsay Huse told The Washington Post. That led local health officials and the Children’s Nebraska pediatric hospital to movequickly to administer testing over the weekend.