Kansas fights the largest outbreak of tuberculosis registered in the United States

An old bacterial enemy makes itself very comfortable in Kansas. Local health officials reported this month that the state is in the midst of the outbreak of tuberculosis – which is now the largest outbreak of the disease in the United States.

Ashley Jose, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kanas Ministry of Health and Environment, presented a update of the outbreak of tuberculosis in the state to the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee last week. Dozens of active and validated tuberculosis cases, dating back to last year, have been linked to last year. And the danger has not passed yet.

“The current outbreak of TB Metro TB is the largest documented outbreak in the history of the United States, at the present time,” Jill Bruneo, KDHe spokesperson, He said Local media local media The Topeka Capital-Journal on Friday. This is mainly due to the rapid number of cases in short time. This fascism is still ongoing, which means that there may be more cases. “

Tuberculosis because of Tuberculosis. It spreads between people across the air and usually affects the lungs, although it can invade elsewhere. Acute cases of TB usually lead to respiratory symptoms such as chest pain, chills, and blood coughing. But the infection can also become latent, and it does not cause the disease until after years when the immune system weakens for another reason. People with Human immunotherapy virus Especially exposed to tuberculosis, because it is more likely to develop a life -threatening issue.

This is the biggest outbreak of tuberculosis in the history of the United States, but given the history of the long disease, the Americans are likely to deal with greater outbreaks in the past. Bruno notes that the centers of diseases control and their follow -up to the prevention of tuberculosis extend only to the fifties of the last century, and at a time when the disease began to fade greatly in the United States, thanks to improving public health and then the availability of effective antibiotics. Before these developments, tuberculosis often represented a common threat to Americans. Even in 1945, as these new antibiotics reached, there was estimated 115,000 new tuberculosis cases in the United States, along with 63,000 deaths.

However, tuberculosis remained a major killer elsewhere. A report from the World Health Organization last fall, for example, Find This tuberculosis once again became the main cause of death in the world from one contagious disease in 2023 (restoring the first place from Covid), with about 1.25 million tuberculosis -related deaths that year. Although cases and deaths have remained low in the United States, they were Get the ground here Recently as well. In 2023, there was 9633 The reported cases From tuberculosis in the United States-the third consecutive year of increasing cases and enough to overcome prenatal levels.

According to KDHE, there have been 67 active cases of outbreaks associated with the outbreak of Kansas, Kansas, the metro region since 2024, along with 79 underlying cases. Most of these cases were reported in Wyandotte Province, although a handful was reported in the nearby Johnson Province.

One of the reasons that makes it difficult to manage is that the outbreak of tuberculosis is that it may take up to nine months of antibiotic treatment to ensure a person’s treatment of it. Drug -resistant tuberculosis can increase the complexity of treatment, although these strains that still represent only a small minority of cases. According to KDHE, it takes much less time to ensure that a tuberculosis person is no longer intended for others who suffer from a continuous treatment (less than 10 days). Since the summer, officials have greatly helped reduce the number of active tings in the region (so far to 32, according to Goss). So, while this fascism is worrying, we hope for its way to be fully containing.

“We still have two adult employees who are somewhat involved in working with this,” Jose told the state’s Senate Committee. “So we expect to find more, but we hope it will be the more active we find for the underlying tuberculosis, so that their lives are not disrupted and they have to stay at home from work. Because it is very infectious.”

Global, experts have Blame The pressure of the epidemic for the last height in tuberculosis, especially in weakening the examination and prevention programs for the disease. However, at this point, there is no clear explanation for the huge number of cases in this local fascism. Given the continuous stopping of communication from federal health agencies such as the Center for Disease Control, it is not known whether the Center for Disease Control will publicly decrease any time.