Thousands quarantined in China school TB scare

BEIJING, Aug 7 (Reuters) Nearly 3,000 students and staff at a school in northeast China have been quarantined after 29 people contracted tuberculosis, a newspaper reported today.

China has an estimated 5 million people with tuberculosis, second only to India, and records 150,000 tuberculosis deaths a year.

Last September, WHO warned that the emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in China and Mongolia was harming global efforts to fight the disease.

Fourteen of the 29 patients from No. 1 Senior High School in Chaoyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, had been confined to isolation wards, the Shanghai Daily said.

The other 15 were in a stable condition and confined to the school or at home, the paper said.

The remainder of the school's 2,859 students and staff had been confined to campus for testing and treatment, the paper said.

The paper did not say how the outbreak developed, but said a student at the school had fallen ill in June, and more teachers and staff had contracted the disease at the end of July.

Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that mostly attacks the lungs. Every year, eight to 10 million contract the disease worldwide and two million die, according to the World Health Organisation.

Reuters PB VP0925