Nearly All at La Quinta Take TB Test : Health: Officials praise the participation of both students and faculty at the Westminster high school. Screening was prompted by spring outbreak.

Nearly the entire student body of La Quinta High School turned out to be tested for tuberculosis Monday, following a report from county health officials that six students were found with active cases of the disease last spring.

School district and county health officials said parents gave consent for 1,100 of the school’s 1,400 students to submit to the skin tests, the results of which are expected to be available late Wednesday or early Thursday.

They said 169 teachers and previous graduates of the high school took advantage of the free testing program.

The student and faculty response to the voluntary test program “was outstanding,” according to Dr. Gerald Wagner, Orange County’s interim health officer. He said the test will be offered later to about 100 students who were absent from school Monday.

Penny Weismuller, the Orange County Health Care Agency’s manager for disease control, said an additional 48 students who did not participate in Monday’s screening had previously taken skin tests that were positive for TB. These students already are receiving medical treatment or have completed treatment for the disease, she said.

Dr. Alan Trudell, spokesman for the Garden Grove Unified School District, said the massive testing program went very smoothly. Between 7:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., he said, various groups of students were excused from class to go to the gymnasium, where the tests were performed with the assistance of 44 nurses and outreach workers.

Nurses were provided by both the Orange County Health Care Agency and the school district, said Weismuller.

Weismuller said the students were injected on the forearm with a substance derived from cultures of TB bacteria. On Wednesday, she said, the students will be checked by nurses for redness and hardness at the injection site that would show a student had been exposed to TB.

Anyone with a positive skin test, she said, will receive a chest X-ray to help determine if there is any visible evidence of a TB infection. A more definitive finding, she added, would come from a sputum culture.

Those students whose X-rays reveal lung damage from TB, she said, will be put on treatment that can combat the disease in six to 12 months. And anyone with a positive skin test, but no signs of active disease, will receive a six-month treatment to prevent a future TB outbreak.

La Quinta students filled out medical histories at school Monday, health officials said, to indicate whether they now suffer symptoms that are indicative of TB, such as coughing and weight loss. Three students with such symptoms were immediately sent for chest X-rays, but were found to be disease free, Wagner said.

The TB testing at La Quinta follows a screening of 220 students last year and the discovery of six TB cases, all in the same junior class, which health officials now believe are linked to a single student who was thought to have a drug-resistant form of the disease.

That student, a teen-age girl who was the first to be diagnosed, was admitted to UCI Medical Center in Orange on Sept. 15 for closer observation. Wagner said she was released from the hospital Monday. “Her culture and smear tests have been negative and her condition has improved,” he said.