Hi
I took my son to get a TB test because I had it when I was pregnant with him and though he was pretty healthy (just jaundiced) we found he has epilepsy recently and he had to be intubated for cervical lymphadenitis as a four year old.

He is now an adult and he has focal epilepsy of the parietal lobe that is always active. He rarely has full blown grand mal seizures, but is ADHD all the time. He also has some bad degerative disease in his spine and scoliosis now.

Anyway, he was coughing and having night sweats and chills and got a TB test recently on a Wednesday and they read it on a Friday. It was swollen in a large area, just beginning to turn red in the middle. Anyway, she felt deep in the muscle for a knot, though she injected very very close to the top of the skin. His reaction was a burn type looking reaction where the top of the skin was stiff and bubbled.

Well, the next day (72 hours), it looked like a full blown positive TB test. So I took him to the ER/urgent care and the doc happily checked it by pinchig the top layer of skin together where it was red and stiff and slightly raised, like a coin, said it was not stiff enough.

All docs said the redness (about 15 mm) was not important at all, it was just an allergic reaction to some other ingredient. How do they know this? It looks like all the other pictures of a postive reaction.

I've read some stuff at the NIH database that talks about redness not meaning a thing with TB tests, but I also feel that it is possible that in an effort to save money, people are not being trained to properly read TB tests. I used to get one every year as a child in school, because I'm old. Mine went away within three days. Anyone who showed up with any redness was singled out as a positive.

I also was trained as a medical assistant to read them, at least a little bit, and to give them, and that the reaction depends on the depth of the injection and you need to wait up to 72 hours. I wasn't sure an extremely superficial injection was all that great, but more to the superficial side but certainly not in the first few layers of skin.

My son still has this huge lump, we asked when it should go away. They keep saying its nothing to worry about. We would have read it as a positive, but maybe things have changed. Maybe it's all to save the government money in treating those with no money, I don't know. What do you think? The bad thing is that he has no insurance and can't get a chest xray to determine if there was a mistake in reading it.