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An ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has officially become the largest ever recorded in the history of the United States. As of this past Friday, there were 67 active outbreak cases and 79 latent infections in Wyandotte and Johnson Counties, located west and southwest of the Kansas City, Kansas metro area.
Jill Bronaugh, spokesperson for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told the Topeka Capital-Journal in a statement last week that “the current KCK Metro TB outbreak is the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history (since the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started monitoring and reporting TB cases), presently. This is mainly due to the rapid number of cases in the short amount of time. This outbreak is still ongoing, which means that there could be more cases. There are a few other states that currently have large outbreaks that are also ongoing.”
On the Kansas Department of Health and Environment website, the organization states that they have “been working with local health departments” and “following the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ensure patients are receiving proper treatment and to prevent additional cases from occurring.”
According to the CDC, Tuberculosis is a disease mostly caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which can stay in the air for several hours and is spread from person to person. Common symptoms of active tuberculosis disease include a cough that lasts three weeks or longer, chest pain, coughing up blood, weakness or fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, chills, fever, and night sweats. It can also affect the brain, the kidneys, or the spine. It can also affect multiple parts of the body at the same time. Treatment of tuberculosis can last for several months before a person is completely rid of it.
“We still have a couple of fairly large employers that are involved that we’re working with on this,” Ashley Goss, a deputy secretary at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee last week. “So we do expect to find more, but we’re hoping the more that we find is latent TB not active, so that their lives are not disrupted and having to stay home from work. Because it is highly contagious.”