Colorado tuberculosis cases hold steady, as a major outbreak rocks Kansas
Most of Colorado’s reported cases of tuberculosis per year are sporadic and not part of local person-to-person transmission chains
Olivia Sun/The Colorado Sun
Colorado is not seeing an unusual uptick in cases of tuberculosis, despite an ongoing outbreak next door in Kansas, the state Health Department says.
The Kansas outbreak, focused in the Kansas City area, started last year, and it has since grown to be among the largest in the country since at least the 1950s. (You may have read that it is the largest in U.S. history, but that is erroneous.)
Two people are reported to have died.
Here in Colorado, cases of tuberculosis are more or less in line with recent historical averages, even though the number of cases reported in Colorado last year exceeded the number of cases reported so far in the Kansas outbreak.
Confused? To an epidemiologist, the term “outbreak” has a specific meaning — it implies not just a new emergence of a lot of infections but also linked chains of transmission that bind those infections together.
Read more at ColoradoSun.com
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