Heartbeat: Tuberculosis in the crosshairs at Sandwell College

July 11, 2019

The long-term health of a local college’s overseas student populous – and the community in general – was last month’s focus for colleagues from nursing and phlebotomy as they teamed up with the local council and Sandwell College to blood screen several hundred students.

The blood screening was to discover signs of latent tuberculosis (TB) and was offered to the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students who have ties to countries that are considered ‘high risk’ for latent TB infection.

Valerie Unsworth, Nurse Consultant for Health Protection at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council explained: “Many people have been exposed to TB in their lifetime and carry it in their body, but it doesn’t cause disease – they just carry the bacteria.

But the risk is that they develop TB disease later in life. We’re screening people for TB to see if they are carrying it, and if they are we can give them treatment, reduce the risk of them getting TB in the future and of passing TB on to others.”

“Screening for TB infection is important because if we can identify and treat it then it will hopefully reduce the cases of active TB in the future,” added Tracy Morrod, Lead Clinical Nurse Specialist relating to TB.

“It’s important to remember that these people that we’re seeing are well. No one is ‘ill’, there is no active disease but some people just carry the TB bug in their body,” says Valerie.

The day of tests follows an initial bout of blood screening previously undertaken which saw the Trust analyse the blood of over four hundred students at the college.

“We carried out a similar screening programme in the college around two years ago,” says Tracy. “We screened a similar group of nationalities – students from ‘high risk’ countries many of whom are young and new to the country.

“Over the last two years incidents in Sandwell have remained stable. We are a high incident area in comparison to other areas of the country. It’s very important for us and the residents of Sandwell that we continue to push against this, and it’s through activity like this that we will help maintain and reduce both the number of current number and future cases for diseases such as TB.”