The Health Service Excecutive (HSE) has denied claims of a tuberculosis outbreak in North Dublin.
Responding to yesterday's publicising of work by Dr Margaret Hannon of the Mater Hospital, which suggested that there was an increased incidence of the disease among young men in the north inner city, the HSE said the research in question had not been published in a peer-reviewed journal or been made available to them.
A spokesman added that the executive believed the data used in the report to be a number of years old.
Speaking on RTÉ Radiothis morning, however, former medical director of Peamount Hospital Professor Luke Clancy supported the findings of the report.
Prof Clancy said he was not surprised by the re-emergence of the disease, adding that the National National Disease Surveillance Centre and a number of international experts had predicted it.
He said that lack of in-patient care for sufferers in Dublin was critical and warned that the closure of the national TB centre at Peamount Hospital had a serious impact on the prevalence of the disease and subsequent care of tuberculosis patients.
"The key element of control in Dublin was Peamount Hospital," he said. "Knowledge about TB was embedded and it gave a service much wider than its local area."
Prof Clancy said that there were aspects to the closure of the unit that should be heard before the Public Accounts Committee.
The HSE also denied one media report today that, out of 407 cases of TB nationally, 300 were found in Dublin's north inner city.
"This is completely misleading and the 300 figure actually relates to the number of cases in north Dublin over a five-year period and not during one year," said a spokesman.
A prelimary figure of 184 cases for the entire eastern region in 2005 has been released by the HSE.
The spokesman added that it tackles TB "through a rigorous combination of both surveillance, treatment and, where it presents, contact tracing".