HUNDREDS of hospital patients are at the centre of a tuberculosis (TB) scare - because a nurse who tended to them was suffering from the disease.

The part-time female employee had been suffering from a persistent cough since last September and went off sick in March when it became worse.

She has now been diagnosed with TB and 500 of her former patients are being contacted by health chiefs warning them that they could be at risk of contracting the disease.

They were all patients on ward 16 at York Hospital - a 30-bed adult general surgical ward, which sees a high proportion of elderly patients, where the nurse was on duty between September and March.

About 80, who were on the ward for more than two weeks and deemed more seriously at risk, are being offered chest x-rays to screen for the disease.

Those patients who have had recent chest x-rays will have them reviewed to check for TB.

The remaining patients - about 420 - are being given advice on what symptoms to look out for.

Staff who worked on the ward are being treated in the same way as the category of less serious patients and are being given advice on symptoms.

The hospital's nursing director, Mike Proctor, said yesterday: "The risk is very small, but it does exist, so we need to inform people.

"We are concerned because we know people will be concerned," he said.

"Some of our older patients will have experienced life in the distant past when TB was a major killer, and they will have concerns. There was a big stigma attached to it then. But it is an eminently treatable disease."

TB is an infectious disease and transmission occurs through coughing of infectious droplets. It is difficult to contract and usually requires prolonged close contact with someone who is infected.

It is curable with a combination of specific antibiotics, but treatment must be continued for at least six months.

Consultant microbiologist Dr Alexander Anderson, who wrote the letters to patients, said: "In similar incidents at other hospitals, they have never found any secondary cases at all."

Last month, the Health Protection Agency released provisional figures for last year which showed that cases of TB in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have increased by two per cent from 8,008 cases reported in 2005 to 8,171 last year.