TB Regimen Ordered for 79 at La Quinta

Completing their investigation just before La Quinta High School closes for the summer, county health officials said Thursday they have prescribed treatment for 79 of the 105 students whose skin tests for tuberculosis earlier this month were positive.

Additional information is needed to decide how to treat the 26 other students and eight staff members who tested positive, they said.

None of these students or staff members has active tuberculosis, but all of them harbor bacteria in their bodies that could trigger the disease later. The purpose of the screening at La Quinta was to decide which of several strains of TB was responsible for individual infections.

County health officials said with that knowledge they could match infected students with the drug regimen that would best reduce their chances of developing active TB. Without taking preventive drugs, there is a 10% chance that the disease will develop in a student’s lifetime, with half that probability in the first two years.

Over the last two years 17 students at La Quinta have been treated for active TB. Ten of the contagious cases were found during a voluntary campuswide screening last September. However, health officials say this most recent screening found no students who were contagious.

Retesting of the entire 1,300-member student body was mandated by the county after one of the students, Debi French, who was diagnosed with active TB last spring, suffered a relapse of the disease with a much more drug-resistant strain.

Dr. Hugh Stallworth, the county public health officer, said that through 150 hours of interviews with students last week, in which state and federal epidemiology experts lent a hand, only five of the students were discovered to have been in close contact with French.

Those students, 18 other students and two staff members who were close contacts of French and earlier tested positive have been prescribed a 12-month regimen of two drugs proven to be effective in treating multi-drug-resistant TB but with no record of preventing the disease.