New fear of Tuberculosis

[maryam]

my grandma has COPD and my mom spends a significant time in the hospital with her. Recently, they moved my grandma to a respiratory center. My mom was sick for like 2 weeks with some kind of repository problem more than a month ago and she got her friend sick too because she was staying at her friends. They both had a bad cough. Its been more than a month now and my mom still has the cough. Now I think she's carrying latent Tuberculosis and is going to pass it on to me because she coughed intensely in the car without covering her mouth . This health anxiety keeps coming. Is Tb common? I wish I was not in constant fear of germs
my grandma doesn't have Tuberculosis btw just the hospital environment and my mom being around the hospital and respiratory centers is freaking me out

 

[Cuchculan]

Coughs are regular in hospitals. I am just out of hospital and I kid you not when I say that nearly everybody had a cough. Some for different reasons than others. With me it was because I was smoker. In hospital you are not allowed to smoke. So you are going without smokes straight off. Never easy at all. TB does still exist. But it is not as common as it used to be. Go back 60 years and it would have been a lot more common. In catching it, people back then might have worked certain jobs or lived in damp conditions. Life was a whole lot different back then. It was much easier to catch. It is one of those things they all but eradicated. With the odd case popping up here and there. Your mother could have simply picked up a normal cough in the hospital. Lord knows the amount of people coughing in the hospital I am just out of. In a hospital once something begins to spread, it spreads quickly. People are ill. Their immune system is lower than normal. Soon nearly everybody in the hospital has the same cough. People come to visit them. They can pick it up too. That is how easy it is to spread.