APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – A high school in Appleton confirmed a student is being treated for a contagious disease.
The St. Francis Xavier High School student is now out of school recovering from tuberculosis.
Xavier High School families found out Thursday that one of their kids’ classmates had contracted tuberculosis.
School principal Mike Mauthe tells FOX 11 the student isn’t going to class until the bacterial disease can no longer spread.
“The protocols for treating tuberculosis are actually, fairly standard, and so that student is obviously in isolation and going through all of the treatment to recover.”
TB comes in two forms: one, where the bacteria is inactive and can live in your body without making you or others sick. Then there’s Active TB, or TB disease, which is what the high school student has.
Appleton Health Department health officer Kurt Eggebrecht tells FOX 11 TB disease is contagious.
“If somebody coughs or sings, or talks and you’re in that airspace for a significant amount of time with that sick individual, that’s how you can contract it.”
To catch the disease, health experts say you only need to be within six feet of an infected person.
Eggebrecht says they also need to have repeated contact with that person for about eight hours.
“In the state of Wisconsin, we see about 40 to 50 active TB cases a year, so it’s not totally rare. In the city of Appleton, we’ve dealt with active TB cases multiple times in the last several years.”
Other Xavier students, who might’ve been exposed to the infection, received letters from the Appleton Health Department.
“They are in a group to be at slightly a higher risk,” Mauthe said. “They will be tested by the health department for tuberculosis, and then followed-up with sometime later, as well.”
Health officials want to stress, TB is not easily transmitted, and they don’t believe the community is in serious danger.
The school is also offering free testing for any student or faculty member there on-site at the school.
Symptoms of tuberculosis include a cough, fever, weight loss, night sweats and some may even cough up blood.
Last year, 10 million people worldwide contracted TB. Of those cases, 9,000 were in the United States — the fewest on record.
