COSTELLO: This morning, there are fears of a tuberculosis outbreak in California, 1,800 high school students and staff will be tested today for TB. Forty five students at Indio High School in Palm Desert tested positive for possible exposure after making contact with one student who has been confirmed to have an active case of tuberculosis. These are live pictures of the high school. The testing is out of an abundance of caution, court to high school official. Joining me now to talk about this is Dr. Sanjay Gupta. How scared should the parents be?</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the good news that the chance of their children getting tuberculosis is pretty low. If you find out there's a child in your child's class who has active tuberculosis, I would be a little freaked out too. They've gone ahead and done testing initially and some of the earlier results came back higher than they expected them to. The screening test was a little bit more concerning, which is prompting those images that you were just showing.</s>COSTELLO: So 45 students test positive. What kind of symptoms who they have?</s>GUPTA: They may have no symptoms at all. If you've had an exposure at some point, it does not mean you had an infection. It means that your body saw the bacteria at some point. And as a result your inflammatory system is a little bit on high alert for it. When you do the skin test, it comes back positive. It doesn't mean your infected or going to get sick, people who get if from somebody else typically are family members, prolonged exposure, like international flights, but it's very unlikely for these kids in this setting to probably infected.</s>COSTELLO: OK, so what if like -- I'm just trying to determine how dangerous this is if indeed you do get the full blown disease?</s>GUPTA: I mean, tuberculosis in and of itself is a bacterial infection that primarily affects the lungs.
Entire High School To Be Tested For Tuberculosis