Teign School TB outbreak 'may have been curbed by earlier screening'

Dr Sarah Harrison says in future people would be screened earlier

Health experts who worked to contain a tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in a Devon school say pupils could have been screened more quickly.

About 200 pupils and staff at Teign School in Kingsteignton contracted latent TB, the form of the disease is not infectious.

Ten more people went on to develop the more serious, active form of TB.

Public Health England (PHE) said screening would take place sooner if there was another outbreak.

It is believed the infection was brought in by a pupil from overseas, who was ill for several months. He was not diagnosed with TB until he left the school in the summer of 2014.

Dr Sarah Harrison, deputy director of health protection for PHE, told the BBC the disease spread far wider than they expected.

"We think that for one reason or another, this first case was particularly infectious," she said.

It is believed TB was brought in by a pupil from overseas

Tuberculosis facts

• It is a bacterial infection that usually affects the lungs, but it can attack any part of the body

• It is caught by being in close, prolonged contact with an infectious person who is coughing and sneezing

• TB was rife in this country until the advent of antibiotic treatment, better housing and improved nutrition began to win the war against the illness

• A vaccine was introduced in 1953 and until ten years ago children were routinely vaccinated

• Now only babies and children considered at high risk are vaccinated

• In the last decade cases of TB have risen dramatically in Britain, increasing almost 50% between 1998 and 2009

• Last year, there were 6,520 in England and in Devon 51 active cases

PHE had followed national guidelines that restrict screening firstly to family and former classmates.

This meant the remainder of the school's staff and pupils were not tested until later, when 200 of them were found to have latent TB.

Dr Harrison said: "We have got a small number of people with active TB and yes, if they had been tested they may well not have developed active TB.

"It's easy to see that different stages could have been done a bit quicker, and I think certainly for an infectious teenager we would be expecting things to happen a bit more quickly than they did."

Watch BBC Inside Out on BBC One in the South West at 19:30 BST for more on this story.