A digitally colorized scan of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause tuberculosis in human beings. Although tuberculosis cases have been rising, public health departments say they lack the resources to stop the disease from spreading. (Image courtesy of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)
Until COVID-19, tuberculosis was the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing about 1.5 million people annually.
Contrary to public perception, the disease is still active in the United States. The number of TB cases in the U.S. briefly dropped at the start of the pandemic, but there was a 5% increase in cases in 2022, according to the latest numbers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 7,874 in 2021 to 8,300 in 2022.
Nationally, those numbers are still lower than they were before the pandemic, but some states — including Alaska, Nevada, South Carolina and Washington — have exceeded their pre-pandemic figures, according to a CDC report citing state data.