Opinion: The Kansas City TB outbreak shows the value of U.S. government health funding

An ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in the Kansas City metropolitan area straddling Kansas and Missouri has made headlines across the country, a rare feat for an infectious disease too often ignored in the United States. While previous reports describing the outbreak as “the largest in U.S. history” were quickly debunked, it is one of the bigger TB outbreaks within a one-year period over the past several decades: Since January 2024 in Wyandotte and Johnson counties, there have been 67 cases of active TB (symptomatic disease that can spread by air and can be fatal if left untreated,) and 79 cases of TB infection (asymptomatic and non-infectious, but which can eventually turn into active disease.) Two deaths have been linked to the outbreak.

As longtime TB researchers and activists, we seldom see this much attention paid to TB in the United States, let alone in the Midwest, where all three of us grew up. While TB makes more than 10 million people sick each year, fewer than 10,000 of them are in the United States. But the outbreak in greater Kansas City offers a stark reminder of the importance of public funding for TB research and programming — and the potentially deadly stakes of the Trump administration’s assault on global and public health infrastructure.

Read the rest…