AUSTRALIA: Australian Medical Association Defends Hospital's Actions

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2008. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

AUSTRALIA: Australian Medical Association Defends Hospital's Actions

Australian Associated Press (12.15.08) - Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Larine Statham

Officials at the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide were right to allow a doctor to continue working after he tested positive for TB exposure earlier this year during a routine skin test, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) said recently. While he initially had no symptoms, the doctor contracted TB later, and the hospital is now screening and treating about 300 premature and ill babies potentially exposed to the disease.

"Anybody who has ever been vaccinated or even been in contact with the disease may have a positive skin test," said Peter Ford, AMA's South Australia president. "You need to be coughing it out for it to be transmitted.

"And because he had come from an area where tuberculosis is common and presumably he had a positive skin test, he was then subjected to more intensive screening," Ford said. "Even if you did a test every week, they wouldn't have necessarily picked it up because even tests for hepatitis can take up to six months to pick up. This is a managed risk situation and it seems to me that everything that should have been done, was done," Ford said.

Among those who have latent TB, 90 percent will never develop active disease, and the other 10 percent may not develop active disease for years, Ford explained.

"I would argue that there would be people in that hospital and every hospital who would have a positive [skin] test, so you can't remove them from society or hospitals on the basis of an unreliable test," said Ford.
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