Georgia: As Rates Decline, TB Doctors Worry About Being a "Victim of Success"

Tuberculosis cases are declining in Georgia, falling 17 percent between 2000 and 2001, according to a report released earlier this month by Georgia's Division of Public Health. There were 575 cases in 2001 and 696 cases in 2000. Despite the decrease, health groups worry that the state's TB programs will deteriorate as state budgets tighten.

Georgia health officials have weathered shrinking budgets for TB control over the last two years. Last year, the budget was cut by 5 percent; this fiscal year, there was a 2.5 percent cut, said Dr. Rose-Marie Sales, chief of the public health division's TB epidemiology section.

Health officials fear a repeat of the past. Both the incidence of TB and the funding to fight it declined in the 1970s -- then rates across the country shot up in the mid-1980s. It took until the early 1990s for state and federal officials to rebuild -- and re-fund -- TB programs to drive the disease's rates down again, said Wanda Walton of CDC.

Earlier this year, CDC reported the nation's 15,991 TB cases in 2001 represented the ninth consecutive year of decline for the disease.

Georgia's TB case rate of 6.9 cases per 100,000 people -- versus 5.6 cases per 100,000 people nationally -- is the seventh highest in the nation and still cause for worry. TB cases increased by 26 percent in 2001 among Georgia's homeless, ending five previous years of decline. Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, which diagnoses 90 percent of Fulton County's TB cases, spent $1.5 million in 2001 to treat indigent TB patients, Sales said. Black people made up 61 percent of Georgia's TB cases, although they represent 29 percent of its population. Some poor Fulton County neighborhoods have TB rates approaching 100 cases per 100,000 people. One-quarter of Georgia's TB cases were from Fulton, state officials said.

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