Anyone present at the region’s largest detention facility for women from early August through early December may have been exposed to tuberculosis, the county health department warned Monday.
In a public notice, the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency said “a person” tested positive for tuberculosis infection at the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility, potentially infecting others at the multi-building complex on Riverview Parkway in Santee from Aug. 5 to Dec. 6.
Though free testing has been offered to staff and inmates known to have been at Las Colinas — which currently houses 760 of the county’s 786 female detainees according to Monday’s daily inmate population report — the public health notice released by the health department contained no information on the gender of the infected person. Their reason for being at the facility also was not disclosed.
Tuberculosis spreads through the air, moving from person to person during prolonged close contact such as sharing a confined space for hours at a time, making jail cells and other shared spaces particularly vulnerable.
Initial tuberculosis infections often cause no symptoms, but once the bacterium that causes the disease takes hold, it can cause a persistent cough, fever, night sweats and unexplained weight loss. Infections can be treated with several different drugs, though a complete course can take six to nine months to complete.
The four-month-long exposure window listed by the health department begs a simple question: How could such an infection be present for so long without being detected?
The county’s jail operation manual of policies and procedures requires jail inmates to “be medically screened prior to acceptance for booking” and state law requires jail operators to have a plan to detect and address the presence of “tuberculosis and other airborne diseases.” It was not clear Monday afternoon whether the person involved was screened for infection or how they remained at the jail for four straight months before their condition was spotted. A health department spokesman referred questions to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which did not respond as of 4 p.m. Monday.
It’s the second time this fall that Las Colinas has been part of a local TB warning. In November the county warned of TB infections at the facility and two others: George Bailey Detention Facility near Otay Mesa and the San Diego Central Jail in downtown San Diego. For all three of those exposures, possible infection windows were much shorter, ranging from a few days to less than two weeks. A similar notice went out in August of 2018 when two cases were detected at Vista Detention Facility in North County and Las Colinas.
So far this year the county has recorded 208 TB cases across the region. That’s slightly fewer than the 226 reported in 2018 and the 237 reported in 2017.
For more information call the county’s TB Control Program at (619) 692-8621 or the Sheriff’s department at (858) 974-5971.
