Wayne Farms’ offer to reimburse the state for the costly tuberculosis testing taking place in Decatur smacks of corporate public relations.

Scott Jones, interim director of the State Department of Public Health’s Tuberculosis Control Division, has a better suggestion for Wayne Farms.

Basically it is this:

Allow the state to clean up this mess and in the future Wayne Farms should screen prospective employees for TB.

Given the number of Mexican and Central American workers at the plant, Wayne Farms should already be doing screening. Tuberculosis rates in those countries are higher than in the United States.

“If Wayne Farms is interested in investing something, my recommendation to them would be to invest within their own facility ...” Mr. Jones said last week, as more testing continued.

All of the employees at the fresh processing plant received skin tests and 212 of them tested positive and will be tested further.

Earlier testing uncovered a second case of active TB.

About 10 percent of latent TB infections eventually become active TB disease, if not treated with medicine. This is a serious community problem, not one confined to Wayne Farms. The workers live, socialize and shop in our communities.

This is an unacceptable threat to the people who live here.

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