KEY POINTS:
Doctors at Auckland City Hospital refused to test a dead patient for tuberculosis even though they had treated the woman's flatmate for the disease.
The flatmate spent a month at the hospital with TB and repeatedly drew hospital staff's attention to the connection between her and the dead woman, who had been diagnosed with only a respiratory illness.
The hospital tested samples from the dead woman only after the flatmate had been discharged and took her case to a public health nurse.
Those tests revealed that the dead woman had suffered from what the hospital described as an extremely rare, aggressive and contagious form of TB.
The belated diagnosis has meant some of the hundreds of staff, patients, friends, colleagues and family of the dead woman now being tested for TB could have had the disease for several months without treatment.
The Herald has also learned that the woman had been working at the Sylvia Park Shopping Centre in Mt Wellington before her hospital admission, coming into contact with hundreds of people each day.
She had also visited family doctors several times and been told her condition was no more than flu.
On her final visit to her doctor, she was told her flu might have escalated to pneumonia.
A friend took her that night to hospital. She was never tested for tuberculosis, and died about six weeks later.
The dead woman's flatmate told the Herald yesterday she too had visited doctors several times and been told only that she was suffering a flu-type illness.
After her seventh visit, the flatmate was sent to Auckland City Hospital for a chest x-ray.
On her arrival, hospital staff told her she had a bad cold.
The x-ray revealed she had almost three litres of blood and fluid in her lungs, but like the dead patient, the flatmate was put into a normal ward with other patients.
After one week, she was diagnosed with TB and placed in isolation.
But even though the flatmate told doctors at the hospital her friend had died earlier in the year with a similar - but undiagnosed - disease, no tests were done to check whether her friend had also had TB.
"I said to the doctors, 'My friend was in here a couple of months ago and she passed away.' I don't know what they were thinking. Either they didn't want to know - I don't know. But it was funny not to make the connection. Because everybody else around me did."
The flatmate stayed in hospital a month. Tests were then done on friends and family to see whether others had contracted the disease. The flatmate's mother had, and was successfully treated.
Only at this point, after the flatmate told a public health nurse of the connection between herself and her dead friend, were tests carried out on samples from the dead woman.
The episode left both families hurting, the flatmate said.
"We were just shocked. It's our families. My family is not very happy with what has happened and it's the same for [her] family. And they've lost her. I just don't want anyone else to die because of it."
Auckland District Health Board's chief medical officer, David Sage, last night reiterated previous comments that the board was "fully confident of the clinical screening process that had been carried out" on the dead woman.
Tuberculosis could be a difficult disease to diagnose, he said. "At no time during the patient's stay was there any indication that they were infected with TB."
WHAT WENT WRONG
* A woman who was diagnosed with tuberculosis at Auckland City Hospital told staff her flatmate had died from a disease with similar symptoms.
* However, the hospital did not carry out tests until the woman took her case to a public health nurse.
* They learned the dead woman had worked at Sylvia Park Shopping Centre, dealing with hundreds of people each day.
* The Auckland District Health Board - which did not test the woman for TB for six weeks while she was in its care - maintains there was no indication she was infected.
