Oops: The ramifications of a false positive TB test:Maureen...

Oops: The ramifications of a false positive TB test:

Maureen Ryan, 64, spent much of January and February of 2006 stuck in her Yorktown house, taking heavy doses of antibiotics that gave her a bad rash, following a test error that led the county's Health Department to believe she had TB.

Dozens of her friends, relatives and co-workers were tested for exposure to the contagious and potentially deadly illness.

Ryan's lawyer, Kevin Kitson, said his client was "under the impression she had given TB to her children, her grandchildren ... she was freaking out."

To rule out the disease, "Her own daughter, because she had respiratory problems, underwent anesthesia and a bronchoscopy," Kitson told The Journal News newspaper. During a bronchoscopy, a doctor threads a scope through a person's mouth or nose and down their throat to look at their lungs.

The reports don't specify what kind of TB test was used to confirm the diagnosis. Was it a skin test? Probably not. No one could go back and check that after the initial reading. Was it a sputum sample? It does happen. Some techniques for quick identification of tuberculosis can also result in false positives by misidentifying close relatives of the bacteria.

At any rate, the false positive certainly resulted in significant hardship for the patient and her family - $75,000 worth.