
“An ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has become the largest in recorded history in the United States,” reports the Topeka Capital-Journal:
“Currently, Kansas has the largest outbreak that they’ve ever had in history,” Ashley Goss, a deputy secretary at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, told the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee on Tuesday.
As of Jan. 17, public health officials reported that they had documented 66 active cases and 79 latent infections in the Kansas City, Kansas, metro area since 2024. Most of the cases have been in Wyandotte County, with a handful in Johnson County….
Tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium that typically affects the lungs, according to KDHE. People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don’t feel sick and can’t spread it. Tuberculosis is spread person-to-person through the air when a person with an active infection coughs, speaks or sings. It is [usually] treatable with antibiotics…..For active patients, after 10 days of taking medications and having three sputum tests, they will generally no longer be able to transmit tuberculosis.
Illegal immigrants sometimes carry tuberculosis, as a paper from the University of Missouri explains, in “Tuberculosis: Illegal Immigrants and Deadly Spread.” As it observes, “In the United States, the largest percentage of people with tuberculosis are foreign-born individuals. This is due to a number of factors, including cultural stigmas associated with tuberculosis and a hesitancy to get treatment. This is an especially prevalent issue in the case of illegal immigrants. First of all, these illegal immigrants probably were not screened for tuberculosis before arriving in the US, and therefore may not even know when they are infected. Second of all, even if they are aware that they are sick, most of them will avoid treatment because they fear being deported.”
In other news, whooping cough cases jumped 14 times in Michigan, due to a drop in vaccination.
Fewer people are getting vaccinated for whooping cough, resulting in the disease spreading. Many more people are getting the disease, which makes you feel awful, as if you are coughing your lungs out. For babies, the disease can be deadly. “Cases of pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, have jumped 14-fold since 2023, alarming state health officials. As of Dec. 8, there were 1,578 confirmed cases of pertussis in Michigan, compared to 110 for the full year of 2023,” notes Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner in the Trump administration.
Vaccines do not cause autism. “Vaccination in general, the MMR vaccine specifically, thimerosal in vaccines, mercury in vaccines—none of it is associated with autism across cohort studies,” notes a science writer, attaching a helpful summary of studies about this, “Across Cohort Studies, Vaccination is Unrelated To Autism.”
“Vaccines are completely, utterly, totally, and entirely unrelated to the development of autism,” notes Steve Stewart-Williams, who writes about psychology and science. Stewart-Williams cites research such as the scholarly article, “Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies.” As that article notes, a large amount of research refutes the false claim that vaccines cause autism.