Narciso Lopez has spent more than two decades working to control the spread of tuberculosis in South Texas. He used to think that when patient traffic into...
Responding to COVID-19 has taken so much attention and energy that some public health workers believe it pushed TB off people’s radar.
“I knew there had to be TB cases out there; they just weren’t being found,” Lopez said in a recent interview. Since 2020, Salinas said, tuberculosis has been “overlooked” as a diagnosis for patients reporting “prolonged cough or cough with blood, losing weight, having fevers.” Convincing people of the need to test for TB was difficult even before COVID, Lopez said. For starters, some health workers wrongly considered the illness a nonissue. That tuberculosis and COVID share similar symptoms became another complication. When doctors and other healthprofessionals saw those symptoms, their first concern was covid. And for a while, it was their only concern.
The Texas Department of State Health Services says on its website that tuberculosis rates are “higher along the Texas-Mexico border” than in the rest of the state. Dr. Armando Meza, chief of infectious diseases at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, said that’s because “almost all cases of tuberculosis in the United States are coming from immigrants.”
COVID is something of a comorbidity because it can make people more susceptible to tuberculosis. Some of her patients have had both illnesses, Salinas said. She suspects some who died of COVID may have had tuberculosis as well, or instead.
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