sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog:
There is ongoing spread of TB in Kansas–so far, 67 cases of active disease.
I want to be clear this is a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall global burden of tuberculosis: 10,000,000 people get sick with TB every year, and 1,250,000 die (almost all of whom die unnecessarily–TB is curable).
It’s also a small fraction of the U.S. burden of TB–we have about 10,000 cases of TB annually in the U.S. It’s an airborne disease, so we shouldn’t be surprised that people are getting sick. We should be horrified that we’re allowing so many people to get sick even though TB is both curable and preventable. (We can stop chains of infection by offering preventative antibiotics to close contacts of the sick.)
We should absolutely be worried about TB in the United States. An airborne disease that’s allowed to infect and sicken ten million people each year is an ongoing threat to all humans. But we should also remember that while we worry about a hypothetical TB pandemic, much of the world has never emerged from the TB pandemic that has lasted for thousands of years and killed many billions of people.
Should you be worried about contracting TB? Yes. But you should mostly be worried that the U.S. government has paused all TB funding, which will increase antibiotic resistance, needless death, and the risk that untreatable versions of the disease will emerge and spread.
amhrancas 