Kansas Health Department warned that the state was facing the largest tuberculosis outbreak in the history of the US, but the CDC has countered the claim.
According to US News, the Kansas State Department of Health and Environment on January 24, 2025, reported that there had been 67 active tuberculosis cases in the state since 2024, along with 79 latent or non-active infections.
Ashley Goss, a deputy secretary at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told the state Senate’s Public Health and Welfare Committee on January 21, 2025, “Currently, Kansas has the largest outbreak that they've ever had in history.” Later Jill Bronaugh, communications director for the department, later claimed that the area outbreak is “the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history, presently.”
Bronaugh, in an email to US News on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, said that the outbreak in the area marks “the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history, presently since the (1950s), when the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention started monitoring and reporting TB cases.”
As per officials, most of the cases occurred in Wyandotte County, and the risk to the general public and other surrounding countries is very low.
Meanwhile, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention rejects the claims about “the largest breakout,” referring to two significant outbreaks in the country.
The CDC spokesperson highlighted that during the outbreak that started in 2008 at an Atlanta homeless shelter, more than 170 cases of TB disease and over 400 cases of inactive TB were reported by 2017, and in the 2021 outbreak, 87 people who received bone grafts from a donor with TB symptoms later showed signs of the disease.
