What Caused TBs Resurgence?
During the 19th century, TB claimed more lives in the United States than any other disease. Improvements in nutrition, housing, sanitation, and medical care in the first half of the 20th century dramatically reduced the number of cases and deaths. TB’s decline hastened in the 1940s and 1950s with the introduction of the first effective antibiotic therapies for TB. By 1985, the number of cases had fallen to 22,201 in the United States, the lowest figure recorded in modern U.S. history. In 1985, however, the decline ended and the number of active TB cases in the United States began to rise again. Several forces, often interrelated, were behind TB’s resurgence: • The HIV/AIDS epidemic. People with HIV are particularly vulnerable to reactivation of latent TB infections, as well as to disease caused by new TB infections. TB transmission occurs most frequently in crowded environments such as hospitals, prisons, and shelters where HIV-infected individuals make up a growing proportion of the p
