Kansas City’s TB Outbreak Can Be Contained With the Lessons From COVID-19

In the final part of our interview with Michael A. Bernstein, MD, director of pulmonary and critical care at Stamford Health, he shares ways individuals can protect themselves and help prevent the spread of tuberculosis (TB).

On a wider scale, Bernstein reflects on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and how they can be applied to contain the ongoing TB outbreak in Kansas City, Kansas.

Watch parts 1 and 2 of the interview to learn more about TB and the outbreak in Kansas City.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

What steps can people take to protect themselves and prevent the spread of tuberculosis?

I think the first thing is if you have TB—or you're part of a community that has TB—[is] not really to be ashamed or embarrassed by this but to let the people around you know. There will likely be outreach to those people by people in a health department, whether it be a county health department, city health department, or state health department, to help identify these people and screen them and to not really hold back [information]. You want to get people treated and identified as soon as possible in those situations.

The second is if you are put on treatments, to help make sure you take the medications the right way, [at] the right times a day, for the right amount of time. Then, like many communicable diseases, there are periods of quarantine or isolation that will go along with [TB]. It's frustrating for people who are put in those circumstances, but you're going to expose your loved ones and your family the most.

Like many communicable diseases—and we certainly learned this with COVID-19 and we see this with influenza—you're most likely to get these infections from the people you live with, you work with, and you're around the most. Those are people that many of us care about, hopefully, the most and want to reduce their risk of infection. Being forthright and honest with those people would really help prevent any communicable disease, in particular TB.

What lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic could help prevent this TB outbreak from escalating?

I think these are all public health issues that come up all the time now in the news, which is having effective public health reporting systems, good communication to both health care providers and to patients to understand what's going on in, and an appropriate balance between giving the right amount of caution to the public but not over-scaring everybody out there. That's a balance that we've learned from 5 years ago. I don't think we got it exactly correct 5 years ago, and I'm not sure we're going to get it correct, exactly, in 2025, but it's an ongoing process to make sure you get the right information to the right amount of people in the right way that will help the most.

Also, remember that most of these diseases rely on public health departments that rely on funding to make sure they have the right people to help track and screen these diseases and that they're an important part of our community. It's always easier to play a little bit of offense to identify people who are at risk than a defensive position when there's already an outbreak going on.