WASHINGTON, USA — Public Health - Seattle & King County recently reported it is conducting evaluations after tuberculosis exposure at Kentridge High School.
One member of the Kent School District community tested positive for active tuberculosis, and more than 100 people may have been exposed between March and September, according to the department.
Public Health will conduct blood tests in October and direct people who may have been infected to seek treatment.
"Remember that active TB disease and latent TB infection are different. Unlike active TB disease, people with latent (or dormant) TB infection can’t spread it to others and are not ill with the disease," a Public Health - Seattle & King County spokesperson wrote in a statement. "Approximately 100,000 people in King County have latent TB infection. While they aren’t contagious now, they could potentially have active TB in the future and also infect others."
It comes as the Washington state Department of Health confirms it saw a slight uptick in tuberculosis cases in 2021 and 2022, citing a prison outbreak and a lapse in care-seeking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
David Sherman, head of microbiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the principal investigators for the Seattle Tuberculosis Research Advancement Center, said tuberculosis remains rare in Washington and across the United States but is still rampant globally. He said public health infrastructure has been key to keeping it that way.
"If someone comes down with TB in this country, there is an investigation," Sherman said. "Contacts are tracked down and spoken with, there are tests that are done to see whether people have also been infected- so we can nip the spread of the disease in the bud. That's helped a lot."
According to the Department of Health, tuberculosis disproportionately affects vulnerable populations in Washington state. On average, five cases are diagnosed each week. After a decade of generally decreasing diagnosis rates, incident rates rose "similar to the trend seen in the United States as a whole," according to the Department of Health. Still, the numbers remain low; In 2022, 251 cases were reported.
"In Seattle, in King County, in Washington state, the numbers are low enough that it doesn't take that much to see an uptick," Sherman said. "The surveillance needs to be constant and all it takes is one time that someone didn't go seek their medical care quickly enough - there was a lot of that during COVID - and that led to a few more cases."
Sherman notes that tuberculosis is still endemic in many places worldwide, and better intervention is still needed there. He said we need to invest in public health research and support the people who have helped keep tuberculosis so rare in the United States.
"TB is not getting the attention it needs in terms of public health, in terms of research. We need to do much, much more," Sherman said. "The fact that we don't have a vaccine that works is frankly appalling. There are people working very hard on that, right here among other places, but we need more resources, we need more people, and we need to take this seriously."
Still, he stresses that tuberculosis is treatable. He said people should remain calm about it, and if they are exposed to an active case, to get tested.
"Sometimes people with TB end up being stigmatized, there's a lot of fear; that fear is unwarranted," Sherman said. "There's no reason we have to try to pull up the drawbridges and not let people in because we're afraid we'll get TB or something like that. If someone gets sick, there is treatment. We can take care of it, but we really need to be diligent about it."