PATIENTS and staff at Faversham Cottage Hospital are being offered screening for tuberculosis after a man suffering from the disease was transferred to a specialist ward at Dartford's Darent Valley Hospital.

The man had been undergoing treatment since June but had failed to respond to treatment. He is now in a specialist negative pressure ward.

Public health chiefs sent out warning letters on Monday to patients and staff of the cottage hospital who might have come into contact with the patient.

Kent's clinical director of communicable disease control, Dr Mathi Chandrakumar, issued the warning after he was told the patient had not responded to treatment.

This raised the prospect that doctors were dealing with a rare super strain of the disease called multi-drug resistant TB. But, as yet, it was known only that the man's TB was resistant to one drug.

Dr Chandrakumar said: "The risk of infection is very small. Sometime ago we carried out a similar TB screening exercise at Kent and Canterbury Hospital and out of over 500 potential contacts, not one turned out to have been infected."

There were normally 50 to 60 cases across Kent each year, but it is stressed that though anyone can catch TB, for most people in the UK the risk was very small indeed.