TB not a life-long infection in most people: Study

While active TB disease is treated with a combination of medications for six to nine months, latent TB is usually treated as well to prevent future active disease.

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Notably, there are two types of tests used to diagnose TB: a blood test and a skin test. (Photo: Getty Images/Thinkstock)

A new study suggests that people who test positive with latent immunologic tuberculosis (TB) skin or blood tests rarely develop the disease because the infecting organism, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is likely dead, wiped out naturally by people’s immune systems. This likely explains why standard tuberculosis tests show a positive result despite the bacteria’s absence, since those tests look for an immune response and not live bacteria, the authors said.