CDC says progress against TB slows in U.S.

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tuberculosis is appearing in the United States at the lowest rate ever recorded, with foreign-born people accounting for a majority of the cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.

It said 13,293 TB cases were reported in the United States in 2007, with the TB rate declining by 4.2 percent from 2006 to 4.4 cases per 100,000 people.

Nearly 60 percent of the cases were seen in people born in other countries, with more than half of them from four nations -- Mexico, the Philippines, India and Vietnam, the CDC said.

The TB rate among foreign-born people was 9.7 times higher than those born in the United States, the CDC said.

Nearly a third of the world's population is infected with the bacterium that causes TB, although active TB disease develops in only a fraction of these people.

TB has been on the retreat in the United States for decades. The first government report tracking overall TB cases was in 1953, with a rate of 52.6 per 100,000, which has not been exceeded since. The 2007 rate was the lowest on record.

Tuberculosis in the United States was in the spotlight last year when Atlanta resident Andrew Speaker triggered an international health scare by flying to and from Europe for his wedding and honeymoon with a difficult-to-treat form of TB. He was forcibly treated on his return and has been released.

Dr. Thomas Navin, a CDC epidemiologist who worked on the TB report, said there was a TB resurgence in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s closely linked to the AIDS epidemic. That resurgence peaked in 1992 with a rate of 10.4 TB cases per 100,000 people, Navin said.