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Kane County still battling TB outbreak

More than a year after a confirmed outbreak, Kane County is still battling a local spread of tuberculosis that’s quarantined at least 23 people so far.

The Kane County Board’s Public Health Committee received that statistic Tuesday during an update on the county’s effort to control the spread of the potentially fatal infection. The common thread for those infected so far stems from exposure while receiving support services at Aurora’s Hesed House.

The not-for-profit is the largest homeless shelter in the state outside Chicago, serving about 1,000 a year. Some 760 people were exposed to tuberculosis at the shelter, with the first confirmed case popping up in April of 2009.

Since then, the county has diagnosed 23 people with the active form of tuberculosis and 146 people with the latent form. Of the two, the active form is the more dangerous and requires those infected be quarantined for up to one year while taking up to four medications a day.

The county has housed people with the active form in an older hotel. The location of the hotel is being kept private by government officials so as not to harm future business for the hotel.

Ryan Dowd, executive director of Hesed House, said the outbreak has been relatively contained and exposure at other homeless shelters in the county has not been seen.

“The good news on that is when we look at patterns of people moving between shelters in Kane County there has been very little migration,” Dowd said.

About 8 percent of Hesed House’s clients stay at the shelter for a year. Half the clients are there for at least three months. The shelter’s ventilation system and the close confines of the sleeping quarters helped spread the outbreak, health officials said. Now the shelter is in line for a $300,000 upgrade to the ventilation system. It’s asking the county to provide $100,000 from the county’s riverboat gambling proceeds to help fund the project. The rest of the cash is expected to come from an Aurora-based grant. It already costs about $65,000 to house and feed the patients under quarantine.

Of the 23 active cases identified, only three remain under quarantine, including one relatively new patient. One patient with a latent case of tuberculosis also remains under direct observation to ensure the proper medications are taken, but the patient is not under quarantine.

“The TB outbreak has been a real pain in the you-know-what,” Dowd said. “But it could’ve been a lot worse if we had a lesser health department.”