More than 100 children are being tested for tuberculosis after being exposed to the third world disease at a childcare centre in Sydney’s east.
NSW Health set up a makeshift clinic to test 104 children and 34 staff from the Little Feet Early Learning and Childcare in Waverley after parents were notified on Friday about an infected person.
A statement from the centre stated that the person who had tested positive had been at the centre three days a week for six months between February and August, Nine News reported.
NSW Health held a webinar for families where they informed them the risk of transmission was low, but parents said the childcare centre had not revealed if the infected individual was a child or a worker.
South Eastern Sydney Public Health Unit director Dr Vicky Sheppeard said tuberculosis could progress into an active disease over a period of weeks or months in children under five.
“Sometimes there is no spread at all, sometimes we find a handful of people who have caught the infection,” she said.
“We won’t know for sure if there has been any spread of infection until we go back in November.”
All of the tested children will be given a course of antibiotics regardless of their test results, and will be retested again in eight to 12 weeks.
The infected person will return to the centre after recovering from the disease.
Tuberculosis is rare in Australia with the majority of the approximately 1,300 yearly cases nationwide being contracted overseas in foreign-born patients, and symptoms include fever, persistent cough, weight loss and fatigue.
There are about 500 active cases in NSW, most of whom were infected abroad.
In July last year a young Indian woman died of the lung disease just after boarding a Qantas flight from Melbourne to Delhi.
Header image: The affected childcare centre (Nine News).
