Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/government/2025/01/24/kansas-tuberculosis-outbreak-is-largest-in-recorded-history-in-u-s/77881467007/

by toastedwedge • 1 year ago

421 252 1 year ago

cjonline.com

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

From the article:

    An tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has become the largest in recorded history in the US....the CDC started monitoring TB in the US in the 1950s.

    "This is mainly due to the rapid number of cases in the short amount of time. There are a few other states that currently have large outbreaks that are also ongoing."

    People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don't feel sick and can't spread it. It is treatable with antibiotics.

    State public health officials say there is "very low risk to the general public."

ceejayoz6• 1 year ago

It is treatable with antibiotics.

Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculos...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tub...

People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don't feel sick and can't spread it.

https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-r...

"Analysis of data from 14 countries in Africa and Asia suggests that about two thirds of global TB transmission may be from asymptomatic TB (95% prediction interval: 27–92%)."

Spooky23• 1 year ago

Yeah… understatement with respect to TB is pretty scary. There’s a limited set of effective antibiotics, some strains are resistant, and some drugs have severe side effects.

You have to be a little suspicious of some of this — folks are looking for political reasons for scary disease outbreaks.

eth0up7• 1 year ago

Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance.

I have long suspected this as part of why the subject isn't much discussed, despite being more prevalent than most realize.

The elephant here is (aside from latent infection) the atypically long duration of treatment, which can exceed 6 months and is harsh. Many, even otherwise responsible people, will founder before the proper end of treatment and this, I think, is what terrifies health professionals - so much, that it almost seems to be avoided.

It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Some in medical journals, are under scrutiny, but inconclusive.

Edit: I also think we'll be finding more about latent infections being involved in an array of other ailments, especially when mixed with the ultra prevalent EBV. And EBV is involved in a lot.

JoBrad• 1 year ago

On top of it being more resistant, we haven’t made very many new medicines to fight it in the last ~50 years.

llamaimperative6• 1 year ago

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).

But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.

So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/

johnnyanmac10• 1 year ago

How is it that Trump is so timely at cutting medical resources right before the moment it is most needed? Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.

llamaimperative6• 1 year ago

Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

I think this + bad luck, really.

nejsjsjsbsb• 1 year ago

Trump is not acting in people's best interests. Wait, just rumaging around looking for my shocked face mask.

Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.

hedora3• 1 year ago

Cutting resources often is the root cause for an outbreak.

- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.

- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.

Etc, etc.

avs733• 1 year ago

[flagged]

intermerda• 1 year ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

Interesting. So you were able to see these and reports last year and all the way through January 21st this year?

Because there's only been one reported car in 2025 in Kansas, I'd be surprised...

roenxi• 1 year ago

"Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!

1. Is there an argument here that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report's unbroken publication record is so important it should switch votes?

2. They probably still filled the report in, so there is a chance it eventually gets published. No need to abandon hope yet.

layer8• 1 year ago

It’s not exactly an outlier among the many arguments.

llamaimperative6• 1 year ago

Yes there's an argument that "having vs not-having functional contagious disease surveillance, alerting, and learning systems" can change political outcomes.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

I wonder if we’d do better in discourse to stop pointing at an “administration.” It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.

behringer4• 1 year ago

The majority of people don't want this. 36 percent of americans didn't vote.

That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.

Trasmatta2• 1 year ago

Democracy doesn't mean "accept what the current administration does with no criticism, because they were democratically elected"

SideQuark4• 1 year ago

Around 20% of Americans voted Trump, and from polls most don’t like him, but always vote R. Die hard Trumpers are at best 10% of Americans. Trump didn’t even get 50% of the vote.

His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.

SecretDreams2• 1 year ago

It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.

Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.

But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.

TylerE• 1 year ago

Less than 31% of people voted for this administration. So no, it isn't.

specialist• 1 year ago

Have you read Democracy for Realists?

TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.

giantg23• 1 year ago

Wouldn't this have showed up in the reports last year when the numbers were actively happening? There's been 1 case this year it says.

If the ideology was what you're saying, then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?

dartos• 1 year ago

One might conclude, given how closely the current administration has been following the project 2025 plan that was floating around, that the administration paused functions pending ideological purity checks on key personnel.

Ofc, one may conclude anything one wants,

aliasxneo3• 1 year ago

This year has been a rough start for HN. The political commentary is infecting every thread.

weaksauce• 1 year ago

then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?

pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.

bannable• 1 year ago

"Since 2024" means from the beginning of 2025, not "during 2024".

llamaimperative6• 1 year ago

This isn't really an urgent "alert" system per se, more of a knowledge dissemination system. Security postmortems more so than critical security patches.

We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7235a4.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/ss/ss7304a1.htm

chairmansteve2• 1 year ago

32 active cases actually. 1 new case since January 1st.

GeekyBear2• 1 year ago

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.

Globally:

The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19.

https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...

As well as in the US:

After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/us-tuberc...

wahern2• 1 year ago

The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.

It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.

Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.

gonzobonzo2• 1 year ago

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).
But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.

Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.

vtashkov• 1 year ago

Last week it was still the job of the previous administration to publish it and it was the last administration which created the problem in the first place. Ideological purification was also what the previous administration has done quite a lot by hiring people based on their sexual preference, skin colour, gender and other irrelevant to the job characteristics.

levocardia• 1 year ago

How can this possibly be America's largest TB outbreak in history? TB was killing thousands of people per year in America in the 1800s.

PhoenixReborn• 1 year ago

The crucial word in the headline is "recorded". I doubt that record-keeping in the 1800s was as comprehensive as it is today.

Additionally, from the article:

the CDC started monitoring TB in the US in the 1950s.

lolinder2• 1 year ago

Eh, "recorded history" is totally the wrong phrase.

When we say "recorded history" we don't mean "the window of time in which we have detailed records up to our modern standards", we specifically mean "the window of time in which we have records of any sort", contrasted with "prehistory".

The phrase they were looking for is "largest on record" or even better "largest since 195X".

For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BCE, and it coincides with the invention of writing.

EDIT: Downvote away, but I'd be interested to hear from someone who believes that "recorded history" is not incorrect and confusing usage here, with an explanation rather than a drive by vote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history

thrance• 1 year ago

The article states that they only started recording in the 1950s.

ceejayoz6• 1 year ago

She noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started monitoring and reporting tuberculosis cases in the U.S. in the 1950s.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

But surely our disease experts know about the past outbreaks and their impact and wouldn't say something patently untrue like the headline.

dang4• 1 year ago

Ok, we've put the CDC up there instead. Thanks!

Edit: actually let's put the 1950s up there instead. I think there's more information that way.

DFHippie• 1 year ago

If you read the article, it appears they've only been keeping records in Kansas since the 50's. And I think the headline is wrong: it's the biggest in Kansas's records. I could be mistaken about that.

NotYourLawyer2• 1 year ago

Weird. Where did it come from? It’s basically unheard of in the US.

doodlebugging2• 1 year ago

Here is an early article about the outbreak. [0]

[0] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/09/05/...

Appears that it originated within a family group involving 6 kids and 7 adults.

admissionsguy• 1 year ago

It came from abroad.

scripturial• 1 year ago

It’s still relatively common in some other countries. As usual, it’ll be connected to travel.

ceejayoz6• 1 year ago

We have roughly 10k cases a year. https://www.cdc.gov/tb-surveillance-report-2023/summary/nati...

NotYourLawyer2• 1 year ago

Oh wow, That’s still not much, but I was under the impression it was a lot less common than that.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Is the CDC still a thing or did an executive order defund them too?

malfist2• 1 year ago

They were ordered to halt all publications, cancel trainings and not communicate with state health departments

api• 1 year ago

What is the supposed rationale for this? Or is this just a general ideological purge of the government?

This is going to be a crazy four years, if it’s only four.

netman21• 1 year ago

Largest in recorded history is a bit of hyperbole. In the 1800s something like 80% of all Americans had the TB bacillus and of those that came down with TB a huge percentage died.

cushychicken• 1 year ago

I agree, the emphasis probably should be on “recorded”, not “largest”.

raffraffraff• 1 year ago

I assumed that the emphasis is correctly on "outbreak", ie: a single statistically significant increase, as opposed to a progressive increase over centuries (which is what led to the huge numbers in the 19th century)

boringg• 1 year ago

How are you going to get people to click on the article without hyperbole?

lolinder2• 1 year ago

Yeah, the phrase they were looking for is "largest on record", or more precisely "largest in the CDC's records".

"Recorded history" has a very specific definition that places it in contrast with "prehistory": it's the time period in which we have written records of any sort, as opposed to the time period in which there is no surviving writing. That both phrases have "record" in them doesn't make them synonymous.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

Largest means a very different thing when the us population is 40 million versus 400m.

What’s a heinous tragedy in one could be an existential threat in the other.

odyssey7• 1 year ago

That’s pretty much what I was looking for in clicking on the article, by what logic or rationale they made that statement.

SecretDreams2• 1 year ago

Hopefully we can course correct before we have to relearn lessons from the 1800s.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

Maybe if we learned about the 1800’s in school things would be going better now.

mhandley2• 1 year ago

Not being from the US, I find it odd that the article didn't mention anything about vaccination. Until 2005, pretty much everyone in the UK received the BCG vaccine. After that the TB rate fell too low to merit routine vaccination, but even today it's still given routinely in a few areas where the rate merits it, or if there's elevated risk of exposure via family from abroad, etc. Has vaccination in general become such a divisive topic in the US that articles about diseases for which we used to routinely vaccinate don't even mention that a vaccine is available and greatly reduces the risk of the most severe forms of TB, such as TB meningitis?

ksenzee3• 1 year ago

It’s a valid question, but I don’t think the current vaccine-unfriendly climate in the US is the reason why the BCG vaccine wasn’t mentioned. BCG wasn’t routinely given in the US even in the last half of the 20th century when vaccines were universally popular. I was surprised to learn a TB vaccine even existed when I started a public health−adjacent job in the 2000s. Our public health establishment just isn’t convinced it’s worth giving here.

BeetleB4• 1 year ago

The US medical community never accepted the effectiveness of that vaccine. They don't think it does a good job at prevention and it makes it harder to detect as anyone whose had that vaccine treats positive with the skin test.

Animats• 1 year ago

The BCG vaccine does exist, but it's an 90 year old live-virus vaccine with short-term side effects. Because it's a live-virus "natural" vaccine, it can't be used on people who are immunocompromised or have HIV. There's work on more modern vaccines.[1] No big successes yet.

The safety record of the BCG vaccine, in terms of permanent harm, is pretty good. But a normal side effect is "The usual expected reaction to BCG vaccination is redness and/or a small lump at the injection site, followed by a small ulcer (open sore) a few weeks later (usually less than 1 cm in diameter). The ulcer may last from a few weeks to months before healing to a small flat scar."[2] Mass vaccination will have parents screaming "my perfect baby has an open sore from the vaccine" on Instagram, with pictures.

The classic live-virus smallpox vaccine has similar side effects, by the way, plus a death rate of 1-2 per million.

Huge political problem. Remember all the screaming about the COVID vaccines, which are pure RNA, can't replicate, and have fewer side effects.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3349743/#s6

[2] https://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/immunisati...

danw1979• 1 year ago

Kind of related to your point… I remember my maternal Grandmother was looking after me one day and I’d either missed or skipped my earlier vaccination appointment in school (which, I think was a BCG or booster, it was in the early 1990s). She was raised by her maternal Grandmother after her mother died from TB when she was 2 years old. Her father died of… something infectious when she was teenager

(the oral history is obviously a bit sketchy, but she used to tell me her father also caught TB - cholera maybe ? - when he was removing bodies from the flooded Balham tube station in 1940 - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/75th-anniversary-of-the...)

Well, I got quite the scolding about missing my jabs and a stern lecture about how many awful diseases have been cured because of vaccination. I could never forget how emotional she was about it.

To people born in the early 20th century, seeing the effects first hand of the vaccination programmes of the mid 20th century (not to mention antibiotics) must have seemed miraculous. I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.

rightbyte• 1 year ago

I think it was just some small anti-culture (like healing stones or whatever. Same people initially) that got dragged into the with us or against us political landscape of the US.

close04• 1 year ago

I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.

This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.

They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.

They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.

Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.

nobodyandproud• 1 year ago

Tried-and-true vaccines are like plumbing or city infrastructure: Once established, it’s taken for granted and the true value can’t be intuited.

poulpy123• 1 year ago

I just checked and it's not mandatory anymore in France, which probably absurd because there is a surge of tuberculosis due to migration and international travel

Yeul• 1 year ago

In the Netherlands people who travel to non Western countries can get their vaccinations.

There's an old Dutch fort in Ghana with a graveyard. Prior to modern medicine white people dropped like flies in Africa.

exe342• 1 year ago

natural selection also applies to memes. memes that cause their host to fail to raise children to reproductive age will get weeded out, but it can take many generations.

jjk166• 1 year ago

Memes don't need to be passed on hereditarily. It is entirely possible for a meme which absolutely prevents the host from reproducing to persist indefinitely so long as it spreads to new hosts at around the same rate hosts die out. See clerical celibacy. It is also possible for memes to lie dormant and then resurge after an extended period of time by which all the original hosts are dead.

gtgvdfc2• 1 year ago

You got the BCG vaccine in the UK? Are you sure?

I got it when I was a toddler in the late 80s and I still remember the excruciating pain and have the scar to show for it.

I grew up in the third world. I have never met a Westerner with this scar unless they got it in the sixties.

clarkdave• 1 year ago

As a British millennial, I got it at school, I guess sometime in the 90s. Still have the scar

mhandley2• 1 year ago

Yes, I'm sure, and have the scar on my arm to show for it. Everyone in my school had it. Would have been around 1980.

williadc2• 1 year ago

John Green, author of "The Fault in Our Stars", "Turtles All the Way Down", "The Anthropocene Reviewed", and other fine books is releasing a book called "Everything is Tuberculosis." If you are interested in the topic or just like to read well-written prose, I recommend joining me in pre-ordering it.

shanedrgn• 1 year ago

On that train with you, counting down the days until March!

spuz• 1 year ago

For what reasons do you recommend it?

biohcacker84• 1 year ago

Because even bad writers have fans.

williadc2• 1 year ago

Two reasons: I enjoy Green's work; he's been researching this subject for a few years, so I expect a pretty thorough analysis.

dennis_jeeves2• 1 year ago

Turtles All the Way Down - second this book.

3eb7988a1663• 1 year ago

I had a TB scare last year. Coworker was exposed to a confirmed case. Got tested, and we all turned up negative. I then asked if I could get a TB vaccine, but was told no, because it makes the TB visual assessment test useless. So, to aid future potential diagnoses, I need to be able to be infected by the genuine article.

ksenzee3• 1 year ago

That’s one reason the BCG vaccine isn’t given in the US, but it’s also because the data on whether it’s effective in adults is really inconsistent. It seems to vary based on geography (maybe distance from the equator? they’re not sure). If we were going to administer it routinely, it would be for infants, where the data is better.

throwup2384• 1 year ago

Can confirm. I got the vaccine in the Soviet Union as a kid and tested positive in the US for school admission and when volunteering with special kids. It’s a huge pain in the ass every time because doctors insist on a course of antibiotics that is particularly hard on the liver or kidneys so I have to spend significant time fighting them and getting an exception from administration.

BeetleB4• 1 year ago

That's silly. There's a globule test that doesn't give a false positive for vaccinated people. Perhaps it's more recent than when you last had to go through this?

LarsKrimi• 1 year ago

Fun historical incident, but the "Spanish Flu" was traced back to Fort Riley Kansas. I think some people highlight a specific pig farm even. Now, the CDC do not list any infections of H1N5 in Kansas yet, but... Worth looking out for in anticipation maybe?

Is there any reason why Kansas would be different than other states in particular?

metadat• 1 year ago

Is there public reporting for actions taken by the current American Presidential Presidency?

It would be useful and highly informative to be able to visit a single page to see daily/quarterly/bi-annual/annual diffs of which efforts habe received signoff.

aaronbrethorst• 1 year ago

I have a lot of disagreements with HL Mencken, but I’ve found myself thinking about this quote of his a lot lately…for whatever reason.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

mjmsmith• 1 year ago

"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people."

CHB0403085482• 1 year ago

To me, TB is ultimate test of character. Stopping TB means you care for your common man:

https://youtu.be/GFLb5h2O2Ww?t=75

tim3332• 1 year ago

I was shocked that that said 2bn people carry TB, though it seems from recent research the number is much lower https://www.iavi.org/iavi-report/upending-the-dogma-of-tb-la...

I'm surprised people put up with it when there's a vaccine.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

Nobody "puts up" with TB.

Poor countries and communities cannot afford the options on the market. TB wont be solved until we put people before profit.

chairmansteve2• 1 year ago

Shhhh.... don't tell the CDC.

gigatexal• 1 year ago

If RFK jr becomes HHS lead and is able to push anti-vax policies this could only get worse.

anonfordays• 1 year ago

My friend's husband is a physician that works along the Mexican border and volunteers at migrant shelters. He said the amount of TB that comes through the border is shocking.

Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

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