More than 30 employees at a Chantilly post office were exposed to tuberculosis from a single infected worker, according to Fairfax County health officials.
Initial screenings conducted by the Fairfax County Health Department after the discovery of the illness in early January showed positive TB results on 32 employees’ skin, though further X-ray tests showed there were no active cases beyond the first one, Health Department spokesman Mike Andrews said.
“We’re assuming that it was because of exposure with this one individual with the active case,” Andrews said.
The infected employee, one of the 125 who work at the Brookfield Corporate Drive post office, has not been publicly identified. He has returned to work and has been undergoing treatment, Andrews said.
Public health nurses returned to the site Tuesday afternoon to retest 67 employees who had tested negative for exposure to TB during the first round of screenings, he said. Those results won’t be available for two or three days.
The office was not shut down as a result of the infection, said U.S. Postal Service spokesman Patrick Murphy, who added the response was put in the hands of the Fairfax Health Department.
Such a shutdown or public announcement was not necessary, Andrews said, because there was only a single active case and a low risk for the infection reaching the public.
Fairfax County had 108 cases of TB last year, Andrews said, 100 of which were in foreign-born patients. He said none was fatal. The number of exposures countywide is not recorded.
A potentially fatal bacteria that typically attacks the lungs, tuberculosis has been in steady decline nationwide since 1992, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 14,000 cases were reported in the U.S. in 2005.
Symptoms include a bad, sometimes bloody cough, chest pain, chills, fever and weakness. The disease is spread through the air, often when an infected person coughs or sneezes, according to the CDC.
