Alabama health officials are offering some residents $160 to be screened and treated for tuberculosis after an outbreak of the disease killed 3 people and sickened 26. The Alabama Department of Public Health said it will dispatch extra nurses and TB investigators to Marion, a town 80 miles west of the capital of Montgomery, where the outbreak has been centralized.
In fact, the infection rate in Marion is higher than those in many third-world countries. “This is a case rate of 253 per 100,000 population in the town of Marion. This far exceeds the TB case rate of 2.5 per 100,000 in the whole state of Alabama in 2015,” the department stated in a media release. Twenty of the individuals sickened by the outbreak, which began in January 2014, have ties to Marion; 4 are from the Tuscaloosa area and 2 are from Centreville. Of the 26, 4 are children. Three adults have died. FULL REPORT
