Hundreds of school children are at risk of catching TB after an outbreak of the disease at a community college in South Camden, London. Every child at one secondary school will be screened for tuberculosis after six pupils were diagnosed with the infection.

Health experts fear they picked up the illness while at South Camden Community College. All teachers and pupils who attended the school over the past year will be asked to have a blood test.

The rise in drug-resistant tuberculosis cases in the UK has been linked to immigration and inadequate attempts to control the disease. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) found an increasing number of TB cases are now resistant to any of the drugs used for initial treatment.

The research team suggested this reflects the increasing number of patients with TB who are not born in the UK. Further research showed an increase in the number of cases in people from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Worried parents are now campaigning for all pupils to be given the BCG vaccination, which protects against TB but is no longer routinely given.

A spokeswoman for the HPA said that three of the six pupils diagnosed with TB have an identical strain, which means they may have caught it at school.

Of the six, one pupil is still receiving treatment, while the other five had a type of the disease that was not infectious.

Grainne Nixon from the North East and Central London Health Protection Unit, said: “Infectious tuberculosis is a disease that typically requires close, prolonged and frequent contact with a person with TB disease in the lung before transmission occurs.”

“The greatest risk of spread is therefore to people who live in the same household. The risk to contacts outside of the household, including those in a school setting, is usually low.”

“However because three of the six students have an identical strain of TB and are in different year groups we have decided to screen everyone at the school as a precaution.”

The incidence of TB in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is rising, with more than 8,000 cases reported in 2006.