If you've spent time near someone with active TB disease, you may have been exposed to tuberculosis germs. Contact your health care provider about testing — even if you don't feel sick.
How exposure happens
When someone with active TB of the lungs or throat coughs, speaks or sings, germs get into the air and can linger for several hours. They spread more easily indoors and where air circulates poorly — a closed car, for instance — than outdoors.
TB is not spread by shaking hands, sharing food or drink, touching bed linens or toilet seats, sharing toothbrushes or kissing.
What to do: ask your provider or health department about a TB blood test or skin test, and tell them when you were with the person. Health care workers should follow their facility's infection control plan.
Being exposed isn't the same as being contagious
Someone exposed to TB can't spread it to others right away. Only people with active TB disease can.
TB germs spread through the air. CDC
- First you'd have to breathe in the germs and become infected.
- The germs can live in your body without making you sick — inactive TB, or latent TB infection. Some people never go further.
- If your body can't keep them in check — sometimes months or years later — you develop active TB disease, and you feel sick. Symptoms depend on where the germs grow; common ones are cough, chest pain, and coughing up blood or sputum.
People with active TB of the lungs or throat may need to take steps to prevent spread — treatment, a mask, or staying home from work or school for a while. They're most likely to infect people they see every day: family, friends, co-workers and classmates.
Contact investigations
If you have active TB disease, a health care worker may ask about your contacts — the people you spent time with while you could spread TB — in a contact investigation, or contact tracing: quickly identifying, assessing and managing people who've been exposed, to stop further spread. Your contacts are then reached by the health department or contact tracers, who explain what to do.
A TB contact investigation helps prevent the spread of TB disease. CDC
Contacts can include people in your household, family, friends, co-workers, classmates, neighbors, people you socialize with, people at your place of worship — and anyone else you spent time with while you could spread TB. The health care worker decides which contacts to speak with, and lets them know they were exposed and may need testing.
Your information is confidential. It's shared only with those who need to know, such as your provider, is collected for health purposes only, and is not shared with other agencies such as law enforcement or immigration.
What you might be asked
| Topic | Questions |
|---|---|
| Symptoms | What symptoms do you have? How long have you been coughing? When did you first feel sick? |
| Places | Where do you live, go to school, work or worship? Where do you socialize? Where did you spend time while sick? |
| People | Who lives with you? Whom did you spend time with at home, work, school, church or social activities while sick? Whom do you see every day? |
| Routine | What's your daily routine? |
By taking part, you help protect people who may have been exposed, prevent outbreaks, and keep your community safe.
Sources
Based on "Exposure to Tuberculosis," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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