Tuberculosis

We haven't got tuberculosis.

We have enrolled the boys into a preschool, which is a parent's cooperative. Which means (amonst other things) we need to go once in a while, to help out. And in order to do this, we need to prove that we haven't got TB, so we aren't going to infect everyone else's little preciouses.

You'd think proving you haven't got TB was easy - you do something like walk there, and that shows that you aren't lying in bed, dying. But you can have latent TB, which isn't necessarily symptomatic. The problem is, like healthy Europeans, we've been vaccinated. And tests for diseases don't test for the disease, they test for the presence of antibodies (which was the problem with vaccinating cows during the foot and mouth outbreak - once you've been vaccinated, you can't tell if you've got the disease.) It seems that for the strains of TB which are common around here, the vaccine is fairly useless, which is why they don't bother.

So, we are going to go to the doctor for our skin tests, which have a pretty high probability of coming up positive. Then we look like we've got TB, so we have to prove, even harder, that we haven't by having a chest x-ray. And we have to get this redone every two years (or less, if the boys leave the preschool, which of course they will).