2025-03-12
14 分钟For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of COVID being declared a global pandemic.
So much changed about all of our lives then, and we're still feeling those effects five years later.
As we reflect on this anniversary, our producer, Fonda Mwangi,
took a pulse check on where the US Public health system is now and the lessons it's learned.
We're only a few months into 2025,
and there has already been a number of infectious disease outbreaks across the United States.
There's measles in Texas and New Mexico.
And of course,
we can't forget about the bird flu outbreak in poultry and cows with several recent human cases,
too.
But in Kansas, they've been battling tuberculosis.
The first cases associated with it were recorded in January 2024.
The majority of the cases were in Wyandotte county, which is an urban county.
It's part of the Kans City metro.
And then there were some other cases in Johnson county, also part of the Kansas City metro.
And the thing that was different with this outbreak is that active tuberculosis cases,
meaning the person can spread tuberculosis and is symptomatic, spiked up so quickly.
That's Beck Shackelford Wangonga, a health equity reporter at Kansas News Service.
She actually first broke the story that Kansas was even having a TB outbreak.