Students still living on-campus who were smart - or obsessive-compulsive - enough to read all the e-mails sent by the AU administration learned Saturday that a student has contracted the notoriously scary disease - tuberculosis. This unwelcome news was e-mailed along with a handy fact-sheet from the Centers for Disease and Control. Among the interesting facts learned - a person can have latent TB and not know about it for years, or that without proper treatment it can kill you. Wonderful.
All jokes about deadly diseases aside, approximately 4 percent of all Americans are infected with latent TB - a form that is neither contagious nor particularly dangerous. In certain cases a latent TB infection can turn into the actual TB disease, which, for the most part, is treatable. TB is rare, hard to contract and it is mostly treatable. Nevertheless, it can still pose a genuine threat to an infected person's health.
The D.C. Department of Health recommends that those who were in close contact with someone who has been infected with the disease be notified so that proper precautions and tests can be taken. The AU administration rightly deduced that on this small campus, with only a limited amount of places to be at any one time, the whole student body could have come into close contact with the infected student.
The AU administration deserves accolades for drawing this logical conclusion. TB is contagious and students have a right to know about dangers they face, no matter how small the odds of contraction may be. Unfortunately, administrators didn't follow their own logical conclusions far enough.
The initial e-mail was sent to only students living on-campus, leaving students who now reside off campus with little idea that one of their peers had contracted a potentially deadly and contagious disease. The administration's failure to alert the more than 2,000 students who live off campus is unacceptable. Despite the miniscule chances that an AU student living off campus will catch TB, there is no reason to withhold information from anyone when dealing with a matter as serious as this. It only takes a few extra clicks of a computer mouse to send an e-mail to the whole student body, rather than just a select portion of it. Why not do it?
By limiting the recipients of an e-mail about such a unique situation at AU, the administration has encouraged unfounded rumors. TB is a little understood disease and most people's knowledge about it is limited and out-dated.
Widely publicized cases about scary, drug-resistant strains of TB cloud the truth about the disease. This is not the Wild West - TB is treatable. To combat these misconceptions, AU should have sent out a more comprehensive e-mail to a larger audience. This simple step would have squashed any untrue rumors from spreading undue fear around campus.
