Tuberculosis in Kansas City.

Reuters has what seems like a nostalgic headline from the 1800s, but no, it’s happening now. There’s an outbreak of consumption – that is, tuberculosis – underway in Kansas City right now:

An outbreak of tuberculosis in the Kansas City area has grown into one of the largest ever recorded in the United States, with dozens of active cases of the infectious disease reported, according to health officials.

As of Jan. 24, 67 active cases of tuberculosis, or TB, had been reported in Wyandotte and Johnson counties in Kansas.

The outbreak began last year, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said on its website. It did not specify a source of the outbreak.

The U.S. recorded 8,649 cases of tuberculosis last year, and 9,606 in 2023, according to the CDC.
Tuberculosis replaced COVID-19 as the top cause for infectious disease-related deaths in 2023, according to a World Health Organization report published in October, highlighting challenges in the global effort in eradicating the disease.

The largest tuberculosis outbreak in the U.S. occurred from 2015 through 2017 at a homeless shelter in Georgia, which was responsible for more than 170 active cases and more than 400 latent cases, according to the CDC, which began tracking TB cases in the 1950s.