A Yearlong Tuberculosis Outbreak in Kansas City, Kansas
A yearlong outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City, Kansas area has taken local experts aback, even if it does not appear to be the largest outbreak of the disease in U.S. history as a state health official claimed last week. The outbreak has killed two people since it started in January 2024, according to Kansas state health department spokeswoman Jill Bronaugh.
Tuberculosis, or TB, is a bacterial infection that spreads through the air when an infected person talks, coughs, or sings. It is very infectious, but only spreads when a person has symptoms. TB can take two forms: active, which causes symptoms such as a long-standing cough, night sweats, and weight loss, and latent, which does not cause symptoms and does not spread to others.
As of January 24, 67 people are being treated for active TB, most of them in Wyandotte County, and another 79 have latent TB. The state’s provisional 2024 count shows 79 active TB cases and 213 latent cases in the two counties where the outbreak is happening, Wyandotte and Johnson. However, not all of those cases are linked to the outbreak.
Kansas health officials initially claimed that the outbreak was the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history, but a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuted that claim, noting at least two larger TB outbreaks in recent history.
TB is treated with antibiotics over the course of several months, and a vaccine is available, but generally not recommended in the U.S. because the risk of infection is low and getting the vaccine can interfere with the test doctors use to diagnose the disease.
TB is a much bigger problem outside of the U.S., with 1.25 million people dying from the disease globally in 2023 and 8 million people infected. In the U.S., there were more than 9,600 cases of TB in 2023, the highest in a decade.
