KEY POINTS:
Auckland District Health Board is confident it can stop a rare strain of tuberculosis, which led to a woman dying in Auckland Hospital, becoming infectious.
More than 200 staff and up to 20 patients who were in contact with the woman at the hospital are being tracked down and tested to see if they have any trace of the disease.
But Auckland District Health Board chief medical officer David Sage said it was unlikely they would spread the disease any further as it only became infectious at an advanced stage.
"This is a slow and insidious disease which only becomes infectious when it becomes the pulmonary form, the respiratory form, which is quite a long progression," he told Radio New Zealand.
Antibiotics would be enough to stop the disease if they were found to have the strain, he said.
The female patient at the centre of the scare was initially diagnosed as having a respiratory illness and was not the rare strain of tuberculosis, until after she died several weeks ago after a stay of many weeks in the hospital.
Her case was so rare none of the appropriate TB screenings indicated she could have the disease.
That meant that throughout the patient's stay at the hospital she was treated as any other non-contagious patient would be.
Dr Sage said the actual strain of the disease was not in itself too uncommon.
"It is not the strain, probably, but the immune response of the individual which we saw in this case," he said.
"This aggressive form is very, very rare."
Dr Sage said the woman contracted the disease in New Zealand and did not bring it in from another country.
Patients with contagious TB should be treated in negative-pressure isolation rooms away from other patients, and staff treating them should be issued with special masks.
- NZPA
