Sunday, April 21, 2013

Good riddance?

This week we suspended our tuberculin skin test program for healthcare workers due to the nationwide shortage of tuberculin. I say, Glory Hallelujah! I can't think of a more poorly performing test. Really, it's junk. And we've reached a point at our hospital that no healthcare worker will take isoniazid after a positive skin test until an interferon-gamma release assay has been done and is positive. However, there doesn't appear to be a good correlation between the skin test and the IGRA, so when the two tests are discordant, it's a coin toss as to which is the true result. To complicate matters even more, there's also a nationwide shortage of isoniazid. And don't even get me started on the use of isoniazid to treat latent TB (see here).

Photo:  Mayo Clinic
By -
Labels: , , ,

1 comment:

  1. MommarazziApril 21, 2013 at 5:51 PM

    We have one facility in Indiana, and Indiana declares all long-term care facilities to be "high risk" regardless of the annual TB risk assessment. They are still insisting on annual testing using Aplisol or annual Quantiferon......

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for submitting your comment to the Controversies blog. To reduce spam, all comments will be reviewed by the blog moderator prior to publishing. However, all legitimate comments will be published, whether they agree with or oppose the content of the post.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

OSHA! OSHA! OSHA!

  In many parts of the country, as rates of COVID-19 are declining and vaccination coverage is increasing (albeit with substantial variati...