By “infected” I mean they have latent TB. Once you have TB, it never actually goes away, it just becomes “dormant” and will opportunistically become an active infection again later.
So you could say up to 1/3 are carriers, but I don’t really like that term, as it implies they are carriers like they carry a certain gene, when with TB, your immune cells basically just clump around TB to quarantine it. If your immune system gets weak or that clump of cells gets disrupted, boom! You have active TB.
It takes an incredibly low amount of exposure to transmit TB to someone else too.
By “infected” I mean they have latent TB. Once you have TB, it never actually goes away, it just becomes “dormant” and will opportunistically become an active infection again later.
So you could say up to 1/3 are carriers, but I don’t really like that term, as it implies they are carriers like they carry a certain gene, when with TB, your immune cells basically just clump around TB to quarantine it. If your immune system gets weak or that clump of cells gets disrupted, boom! You have active TB.
It takes an incredibly low amount of exposure to transmit TB to someone else too.