Kansas is currently experiencing the largest-ever reported outbreak of tuberculosis in the U.S.
Health officials are contending with an ongoing outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City metro area that reportedly has become the largest in U.S. history.
“Currently, Kansas has the largest outbreak that they’ve ever had in history,” Ashley Goss, a deputy secretary at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee on Jan. 21, according to reports. A KDHE spokesperson later told The Topeka Capital-Journal that the area outbreak is “the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history, presently.”
Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that can impact multiple organs within the body but most commonly affects the lungs. The disease can spread when people breathe in TB bacteria left in the air by individuals with active TB of the lungs after they talk, sing or cough.
And TB can survive in the air for several hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There are two conditions related to TB bacteria: inactive TB and active TB. In latent cases of the disease, it can live in the body of a person without them getting sick, having symptoms or passing the infection onto others. Some people with inactive TB never develop symptoms but, if left untreated, 1 in 10 people with inactive TB develop the active disease.
People with active cases of TB display symptoms that can include chest pains, weight loss, coughing up blood, fever, chills and a cough that lasts more than three weeks.
How Many TB Cases Have There Been in the Outbreak?
So far, 67 active TB infections have been reported in the Kansas City area as of Jan. 24, since 2024, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment‘s Division of Public Health. An additional 79 people in the metro area have been reported to have latent infections of tuberculosis since 2024.
Statewide, Kansas had 109 active and 626 latent cases of tuberculosis in 2024, according to provisional figures from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, compared to 51 active and 1,259 latent cases of TB reported in 2023.
How Many TB Cases Does the U.S. Typically See?
Nationally, cases of tuberculosis have been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the CDC, with the number of reported cases increasing each year from 2020 to 2023. In 2023, the most recent year for which the CDC has data, a total of 9,633 cases of TB disease were reported in the U.S., reflecting a more than 15% increase in the number of cases compared to 2022.
Prior to the pandemic, the number of TB cases had declined nearly every year since 1992, with the largest drop occurring from 2019 to 2020, when the number of cases fell by 19% to the lowest number recorded at 7,170.
What Is the Threat to the Public?
While cases of TB have been on the rise, Kansas health officials said the threat to the general public remains “very low.” .
According to the CDC, anyone can contract tuberculosis, but those at higher risk include frequent international travelers, people who live in large communal settings like homeless shelters, prisons or jails, those who come into contact with someone who recently had active TB, and individuals with weak or compromised immune systems such as the elderly, those taking immunosuppressant medications, or with health conditions such as diabetes, cancer and HIV.
