Tuberculosis Outbreaks: Should We Be Worried?

A yearlong outbreak of tuberculosis (TB) in the Kansas City, Missouri-area has raised concerns about the spread of the bacterial disease. Health officials said the risk to the public remains low, but as with all the respiratory viruses that peak this season Americans should be cautious.

As of Jan. 31,  67 people, in two counties in eastern Kansas, are being treated for active tuberculosis since this the outbreak began in January 2024, and 79 people have latent cases of disease, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). Two people have died in the outbreak.

TB can take weeks to develop, and it is not sudden like the flu and COVID-19. TB is caused by a bacterium that usually affects the lungs but can affect other parts of the body.

The two types of TB infection include: 1) active TB disease, which makes people feel sick and can be spread to others and 2) latent TB infection, which is inactive, doesn’t make people feel sick, and can’t be spread to others.

In the U.S., cases jumped 15% from 2022 to 2023, the most recent year of data that saw over 9,600 provisional cases, USA Today reported. That’s up from less than 8,900 tuberculosis cases in 2019. Still, experts believe the actual number of cases is much higher as many latent cases are not tested.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023, the highest number since WHO began monitoring for the disease in 1995. In 2023, TB surpassed COVID-19 as the deadliest infectious disease, with 1.25 million people who died from infections globally.

TB is treatable with antibiotics, and shortly after beginning treatment, a person with active TB disease will no longer be infectious. A vaccine for TB also is available, but it’s not widely used in the U.S., in part because disease transmission in the country is low, and the vaccine’s protection weakens over time.

However, multidrug-resistant TB remains a public health crisis, the WHO said. Treatment success rates for multidrug-resistant or rifampicin-resistant TB (MDR/RR-TB) have now reached 68%. But, of the 400,000 people estimated to have developed MDR/RR-TB, only 44% were diagnosed and treated in 2023.