Eight months after a UW Hospital employee became ill with tuberculosis, she has recovered and returned to work, and none of her co-workers acquired the potentially fatal lung disease.

"I think she was not very contagious," said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the hospital. "We had no evidence of transmission to anybody else."

When Maki and other hospital officials announced the employee's TB infection in August, they said doctors would test dozens of her co-workers and try to contact up to 150 patients who may have been exposed.

More than 40 employees who worked closely with the woman, whose identity wasn't disclosed to protect her privacy, were given skin tests for TB. There were no positive tests, Maki said.

The rest of the hospital's 5,000 employees were tested in the fall as part of routine annual screening for TB. A few of those tests were positive for a latent, noncontagious form of the disease. That is typical in a hospital setting, and the results weren't tied to the woman who had active TB, Maki said.

The woman, who took antibiotics for a few months before returning to work, likely caught the illness from a patient whose TB hadn't been diagnosed, he said.

— David Wahlberg

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