Tuberculosis cases have been rising as public health agencies struggle to keep up
In Johnson County, Iowa, the number of tuberculosis cases has increased in recent years — and so has the cost of containing it.
The cost of contact tracing and surveillance, traveling each day to patients’ homes to ensure they take their meds or booking hotel rooms to quarantine patients, has surged from $17,000 in 2020 to $65,000 last year.
That doesn’t include $13,000 spent last year for language translation, as many of the cases were among the local immigrant communities, said Danielle Pettit-Majewski, director of the Johnson County public health department. She said the rise in spending is directly tied to the increase in diagnoses since 2020, with latent infections tripling, from 27 that year to 90 last year.
Last week, the state informed the county that the greater number of cases had made it too costly to help pay for the home visits, forcing the county to pay for them on its own.
“I was kind of dumbfounded,” Pettit-Majewski said. “It was surprising.”
https://stateline.org/2026/02/27/tuberculosis-cases-have-been-rising-as-public-health-agencies-struggle-to-keep-up/
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