Kansas City TB Outbreak Public Health Lessons

The ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in the Kansas City metropolitan area, spanning Kansas and Missouri, has made headlines nationwide. This is a rare feat of infectious diseases that are often ignored in the United States. Previous reports describing the outbreak as “the largest in US history” It was quickly exposedthat teeth One of the major outbreaks of TB within a year over the past decadesIn January 2024, Wyandot and Johnson counties had 67 active tuberculosis (symptomatic diseases that can be spread by air and can be fatal without treatment) and 79 cases. Tuberculosis infection (asymptomatic or non-infectious, one that can turn into an active disease, which can eventually turn into an active disease). Two deaths are associated with the outbreak.

As longtime tuberculosis researchers and activists, we rarely get this much attention in TB, let alone in the Midwest, where all three of us grew up. TB makes more than 10 million people sick every year. Less than 10,000 It will soon be in the US. However, the outbreak in Greater Kansas City reminds us of the importance of public funding for tuberculosis research and programming, and the potentially fatal interests of the Trump administration's attacks on global and public health infrastructure.

Tuberculosis is curable and preventable, but it remains the most deadly infectious disease in the world, killing around 1.25 million people each year. Tuberculosis mortality is primarily due to lack of access to prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Public investment makes the care and tools that fight TB available to everyone who needs them and saves life. This includes funding for jobs in the local health department in the country. It's already healed;The rest are still taking courses of therapeutic treatment. The majority of people with tuberculosis infections in Kansas and Missouri also take TB preventive treatment (TPT) to protect them from the onset of active disease. The local health department tracked close contacts of people diagnosed with tuberculosis and who administered treatment and prevention free of charge. It benefits not only the patient themselves, but also the neighbors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention TB Elimination Division is increasing the health department's ability to stop the outbreak of domestic TB in the country.

Everyone who lives in the Kansas City area and exceeds the interests of tuberculosis programming through the local health department has the best possible scientific tools for public health officials to detect, treat and prevent tuberculosis. If we are, we are all better. Since the Treatment Behavior Group added TB to its mission in 2002, it has helped Global TB Advocacy to gain major advances in tuberculosis research and development. Only 20 years ago, we still used it Technology of the 1800s Tuberculosis is diagnosed and treated with incomplete drugs discovered in the 1950s and 1960s. In the first place, a facility visit that takes weeks and weeks to diagnose cases must first be a long-term, labour-different drug therapy, addressing serious side effects, and tuberculosis infection for preventive therapy. No one with the condition had undergone TPT. It was the same length as treatment for active disease. In other words, the tuberculosis intervention we were stuck in was like cutting steak with a butter knife, but it had life and death consequences.

Today, tuberculosis prevention and treatment regimens are shorter than ever and less toxic. These advances are primarily due to public investment in tuberculosis research and testing. For example, one Clinical trials Supported by the National Institutes of Health and CDC TB infection was shown to be successfully treated with a weekly 12-week treatment called 3HP. a Related CDC Trials This 3HP regimen has shown to be safe for young children and to make TB prevention more accessible to children. Yet another NIH and CDC Trials We demonstrated that treatment times for drug-sensitive tuberculosis can be reduced from 6 months to 4 months. In the case of drug-resistant tuberculosis, Analyses of found tags The US government's investment in drug bedaquiline R&D will exceed the spending by product developer Johnson & Johnson several times, and ultimately reduce DR-TB treatments by more than 18 months or more than 6 months. did.

These discoveries probably never would have happened, and without the US government spending, countless lives would have been unnecessarily shortened.

The fact that the health departments in Kansas and Missouri have access to these scientific breakthroughs makes tuberculosis more manageable. – And for those living with TB, their families and their communities, tuberculosis becomes sick and destructive. By providing everyone on the planet with access to the best available tools, reducing the burden of tuberculosis everywhere and ending the transmission chain as quickly as possible.

Don't make any mistakes. To end tuberculosis forever, you need even better tools, such as more effective vaccines. The relentless attacks by the new presidential administration on federal spending related to tuberculosis research and science seriously threaten this progress and betray people affected by tuberculosis around the world.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Erin McConnell is a senior TB project associate for the Treatment Behavioral Group (TAG) that focuses on community engagement in research. Growing up in Palmyra, Missouri, Kendall Martinez Wright is a government and policy official at TAG, focusing on federal law and budgets for HIV, TB and Hepatitis C programs. Born and raised in Metropolitan Detroit, Elizabeth (Lizzie) is the director of US and Global Health Policy at TAG and advocates the policies necessary to end the HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C pandemic .