StopTB Initiative Advancing the End of Tuberculosis in America

StopTB Initiative

Advancing the End of Tuberculosis in America

Latest Articles

What Medical Schools Forgot to Teach: How a Generation of American Physicians Is Missing Tuberculosis in Plain Sight
Investigative Health Reporting

What Medical Schools Forgot to Teach: How a Generation of American Physicians Is Missing Tuberculosis in Plain Sight

Tuberculosis has quietly disappeared from the core training of American medical students, even as the disease resurfaces in communities across the country. This investigation reveals how shrinking classroom hours, outdated assumptions, and competing curricular demands have produced a generation of physicians ill-equipped to recognize one of history's most persistent infectious diseases. The consequences for patients — and for public health — are only beginning to surface.
Small Patients, Overlooked Diagnoses: Closing the Tuberculosis Detection Gap in American Pediatric Care
Patient Education & Public Health

Small Patients, Overlooked Diagnoses: Closing the Tuberculosis Detection Gap in American Pediatric Care

Childhood tuberculosis in the United States is frequently missed or delayed due to nonspecific symptoms, limited clinician experience, and inconsistent screening protocols in pediatric settings. The consequences extend beyond individual patients, creating silent reservoirs of infection within families and communities. This article examines the diagnostic challenges unique to children and outlines evidence-based steps pediatricians can take to improve early detection.
Revolving Doors and Rising Risk: How America's Pretrial Jails Are Quietly Spreading Tuberculosis Into the Community
Investigative Health Reporting

Revolving Doors and Rising Risk: How America's Pretrial Jails Are Quietly Spreading Tuberculosis Into the Community

America's pretrial detention facilities—where the unconvicted wait, often for weeks or months, in dangerously overcrowded conditions—have become overlooked incubators for tuberculosis transmission. Unlike prisons, these jails operate with little standardized health infrastructure, creating a silent pipeline that carries TB from cells into neighborhoods. This investigation examines what public health officials, defense attorneys, and detention health workers know, and what policymakers continue t
Around the Clock Against an Ancient Disease: How 24/7 TB Diagnostic Hubs Are Closing the Gap Between Exposure and Treatment
Investigative Health Reporting

Around the Clock Against an Ancient Disease: How 24/7 TB Diagnostic Hubs Are Closing the Gap Between Exposure and Treatment

In a handful of American cities, tuberculosis testing no longer stops when the workday ends. A new generation of round-the-clock diagnostic facilities is compressing the timeline between exposure and treatment initiation — and early patient outcomes data suggests the model may be one of the most consequential operational innovations in domestic TB control in decades.
Neighbors as Healers: The Quiet Power of Community Health Workers in America's Fight Against Tuberculosis
Patient Education & Public Health

Neighbors as Healers: The Quiet Power of Community Health Workers in America's Fight Against Tuberculosis

Across underserved American neighborhoods, a growing corps of community health workers is achieving what clinic-based medicine often cannot: reaching TB patients where they live, speaking their language, and guiding them through the full arc of treatment. Yet chronic underfunding and a persistent lack of professional recognition threaten to dismantle one of public health's most effective tools in the effort to end tuberculosis in the United States.
Priced Out of Prevention: How America's Insurance Patchwork Is Keeping TB Screening Out of Reach
Investigative Health Reporting

Priced Out of Prevention: How America's Insurance Patchwork Is Keeping TB Screening Out of Reach

Millions of Americans at elevated risk for tuberculosis are going unscreened not because testing is unavailable, but because their insurance coverage makes it effectively inaccessible. A growing body of evidence reveals that prior authorization requirements, fragmented state-level policies, and coverage exclusions are quietly undermining the nation's tuberculosis control efforts—often with fatal consequences.
Investigative Health Reporting

Breathless and Overlooked: How America's Emergency Rooms Are Missing Tuberculosis in Plain Sight

Across the United States, patients with active tuberculosis are walking into emergency departments, receiving treatments for other conditions, and walking back out—still infectious, still undiagnosed. A systemic failure in ER screening protocols is allowing one of the world's oldest infectious diseases to slip through the cracks of the country's most critical care settings. This investigation examines the clinical blind spots, institutional pressures, and human costs behind the TB testing gap in
Patient Education & Public Health

Rewriting the Story of TB: Why Dismantling Stigma Is as Urgent as Developing New Drugs

Tuberculosis in America carries a cultural weight far heavier than its clinical profile alone would warrant — a legacy of shame, poverty, and social exclusion that continues to delay diagnosis and discourage treatment-seeking decades after effective therapies became widely available. Shifting public perception of TB from a mark of moral failure to a treatable medical condition is not a secondary concern for public health advocates; it is a prerequisite for ending the epidemic. This piece examine
Investigative Health Reporting

Invisible at Work: How American Occupational Health Systems Are Overlooking Tuberculosis in High-Risk Industries

Across healthcare facilities, correctional institutions, and food service establishments, corporate wellness programs are routinely failing to detect active tuberculosis cases among workers. Despite decades of established screening protocols, a persistent gap between general occupational health initiatives and TB-specific surveillance is leaving employees and the public unknowingly at risk. This investigation examines why the workplace remains one of America's most underexamined vectors of tuber
Investigative Health Reporting

Resistance Rising: How Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Is Rewriting the Rules of American Public Health

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is no longer a distant global concern—it is quietly reshaping clinical protocols, straining healthcare budgets, and challenging the foundational assumptions of TB management across the United States. As resistance patterns grow more complex, infectious disease specialists are confronting a disease that increasingly defies the treatment tools built to contain it. This investigation examines the science, the patients, and the systemic pressures behind one of public
Locked In, Packed In, Left Exposed: The Congregate Settings Quietly Fueling Tuberculosis Transmission Across America
Patient Education & Public Health

Locked In, Packed In, Left Exposed: The Congregate Settings Quietly Fueling Tuberculosis Transmission Across America

Prisons, homeless shelters, nursing homes, and food processing facilities share more than crowded conditions—they share a dangerous vulnerability to tuberculosis outbreaks that public health systems have been slow to address. Despite documented transmission chains in these environments, infection control standards remain inconsistently enforced and surveillance gaps persist. Understanding how TB moves through congregate settings is essential for any community serious about protecting its most ex
Patient Education & Public Health

A New Arsenal Against an Ancient Enemy: The Scientists Reimagining Tuberculosis Treatment

The standard tuberculosis drug regimen has remained largely unchanged for more than half a century — a grueling, months-long course of medications that strains patient compliance and falls short against drug-resistant strains. A new generation of researchers is working to change that, advancing experimental compounds and novel treatment combinations through clinical trials that could fundamentally transform how TB is managed in the United States and beyond. Here is where that science stands toda
Investigative Health Reporting

Decades of Progress, Undone: The Structural Failures Behind America's Tuberculosis Resurgence

After more than four decades of steady decline, tuberculosis case counts in the United States are climbing again — and public health experts warn that the systems meant to stop this disease are no longer equal to the task. From underfunded surveillance networks to policy gaps that leave vulnerable populations exposed, the story of TB's return is ultimately a story about institutional failure. This investigation examines what went wrong and what it will take to reverse course.
Investigative Health Reporting

Diagnostic Dead Ends: How Promising TB Detection Technology Is Failing to Reach the Americans Who Need It Most

Laboratories across the United States have developed faster, more accurate tuberculosis diagnostic tools that could transform early detection—yet these innovations rarely reach the clinics serving high-risk, underserved populations. A combination of regulatory hurdles, fragmented funding, and systemic implementation failures is widening the gap between scientific promise and public health reality. This investigation examines what is keeping life-saving technology out of the communities that need
Patient Education & Public Health

When One Disease Is Not Enough: Confronting Tuberculosis in Patients Living with Diabetes, HIV, and Addiction

For many Americans living with tuberculosis, the disease does not arrive alone. The intersection of TB with chronic conditions such as diabetes, HIV infection, and substance use disorder creates a cascade of clinical and social complications that standard TB care models are ill-equipped to address. Understanding how these overlapping conditions interact—and how integrated care can change outcomes—is essential for both medical professionals and the communities they serve.
Unseen and Undetected: How Rural America's Healthcare Gaps Are Letting Tuberculosis Spread Unchecked
Investigative Health Reporting

Unseen and Undetected: How Rural America's Healthcare Gaps Are Letting Tuberculosis Spread Unchecked

Across vast stretches of rural America, tuberculosis cases are going undiagnosed for months—sometimes years—because the laboratory infrastructure and clinical resources needed to catch them simply do not exist. This investigation examines the structural barriers driving diagnostic delays in underserved communities and explores the policy reforms and mobile testing innovations that could change the equation. The stakes, public health experts warn, could not be higher.
Carrying TB Without Knowing It: Understanding Latent Infection and Why Treatment Cannot Wait
Patient Education & Public Health

Carrying TB Without Knowing It: Understanding Latent Infection and Why Treatment Cannot Wait

An estimated 5 to 10 million Americans are living with latent tuberculosis infection—a dormant form of the disease that produces no symptoms but carries a lifelong risk of progressing to active, contagious TB. Understanding who is at risk, when to seek testing, and what modern treatment options are available is essential knowledge for patients, caregivers, and clinicians alike. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of latent TB: what it is, why it matters, and how early intervention can p