Staff and stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T’s O’Meara cam­pus are “run­ning scared” over a re­port of tu­ber­cu­lo­sis (TB) at the in­sti­tu­tion.

Staff mem­bers un­der­went screen­ing on Tues­day and one of mem­ber had sev­er­al more tests done yes­ter­day.

UTT’s pres­i­dent Pro­fes­sor Sarim Al-Zubaidy in a state­ment to staff de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “an un­con­firmed case of tu­ber­cu­lo­sis (TB).”

“In or­der to con­firm that it is in­deed TB, a staff mem­ber is cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing sev­er­al tests,” Al-Zubaidy said.

TB is a no­ti­fi­able dis­ease and Al-Zubaidy as­sured that the uni­ver­si­ty is work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to pro­tect staff.

“This in­cludes mak­ing con­tact with the rel­e­vant health au­thor­i­ties to re­port the po­ten­tial risk. These or­gan­i­sa­tions are as­sist­ing UTT in man­ag­ing and mit­i­gat­ing this sit­u­a­tion, co­or­di­nat­ing ef­forts and are al­so will­ing to pro­vide aware­ness ses­sions for UTT staff. The key is to ‘pro­tect, not pan­ic’” Al-Zubaidy said.

He added that based on the test re­sults of the staff mem­ber, oth­er staff may need to be test­ed for TB.

“Please note that in the ab­sence of any con­fir­ma­tion, UTT will con­tin­ue to do every­thing nec­es­sary to pro­tect the health and well-be­ing of staff. The ap­proach to this sit­u­a­tion must be pru­dent, sci­en­tif­ic and mea­sured,” Al-Zubaidy said.

How­ev­er, speak­ing un­der the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, a staff mem­ber said they “are scared stu­pid of this pos­si­ble TB out­break.” I think what should have been done is quar­an­tine of some sort...we maybe al­ready ex­posed and have oth­er peo­ple at risk, in­clud­ing stu­dents and our fam­i­lies...our chil­dren...ex­ams are just about to start.”

“This sit­u­a­tion is not be­ing han­dle good enough and ef­fi­cient enough in terms of test­ing,” the staffer added.