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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Hope your February is off to a great start. Let’s kick off the week by catching up on all the science news you might have missed.

First, a quick note on some presidential moves that might impact health and science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced at least some bipartisan pushback during confirmation hearings for his nomination for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Republican Bill Cassidy, pressed Kennedy to take a definitive pro-vaccine stance. Cassidy, who practiced medicine for decades, claims he has constituents who credit Kennedy—at least in part—for their decision not to vaccinate.

After a lot of back and forth, Cassidy asked Kennedy to agree that if he were to be confirmed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would not “deprioritize or delay review and/or approval of new vaccines and that vaccine review standards will not change from historical norms.” Kennedy replied in the affirmative—but it’s important to note that the nominee has a long history of promoting vaccine misinformation.

You can read more about RFK Jr.’s health care track record at ScientificAmerican.com, and we’ll keep you updated on the confirmation hearings as they proceed.

Last week was also pretty chaotic in terms of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and more. As of last Friday afternoon, there were reports of webpages disappearing from government health agency sites. Stat News reported that data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a large national survey on youth behavioral habits that includes information on gender and sexual identities, had disappeared and was no longer accessible to researchers. The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which highlights groups particularly vulnerable to disasters because of factors like poverty, also appeared to be down on Friday, as did some resources about HIV. That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, and this story was very much still developing as of the time of this recording on the afternoon of January 31. We’re working on a deeper dive on these changes and their implications for this week’s Friday episode, so let us know if you have any specific questions. You can send those over to us at sciencequickly@sciam.com.

Feltman: Now let’s get into some public health news. You may have seen some headlines last week about a record-breaking outbreak of tuberculosis in Kansas. Initial reports dubbing it the nation’s largest TB outbreak since the CDC started keeping track of cases seem to have stemmed from an incorrect statement from the state health department. After the CDC refuted that, a state health official offered clarification, claiming this outbreak has seen the country’s highest case numbers over a one-year period.

The discrepancy has led to some confusion about the nature of this—very real and serious—outbreak. The health department says that as of January 31, more than 60 people in Wyandotte and Johnson counties have been diagnosed with active TB associated with the outbreak, though some have completed treatment since their diagnoses; “active” refers to a type of tuberculosis, not whether someone currently has the illness—more on that shortly. According to a state official, two people have died in the outbreak. Here to unpack the situation for us is Bek Shackelford-Nwanganga, a health equity reporter for the Kansas News Service and KCUR.

Bek Shackelford-Nwanganga: The first cases related to this specific outbreak were, we’ve been told, recorded in January of 2024. There was a pretty large spike over the summer, which is actually when the state came in and started assisting, and that’s when the CDC also came in and started assisting.

Shackelford-Nwanganga: They’re pretty confident that they’ve got the situation under control. They do expect to find more cases. They have to do a lot of contact tracing and a lot of investigations to try and figure out who is in touch with who. But for the most part, they are happy with how numbers are trending downward, and they are monitoring it pretty closely.

Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection. It can settle in other places in your body, but typically it settles in a person’s lungs. You know, when that person coughs or is singing, things like that, it can spread that way. Tuberculosis requires a lot of extended, close contact with a person to catch it.

And then there are two types of tuberculosis. There’s one that’s known as active tuberculosis. This is when a person is displaying symptoms—you know, persistent cough, coughing up blood, pain in the lungs, and then things like night sweats and fevers and weight loss. That means they have an active infection and they can spread it to others. For the other version of tuberculosis, latent tuberculosis—people sometimes call it sleeping tuberculosis—this means that someone has the bacteria in their body, but it’s not causing an active infection. It has to become active for it to spread to others. And if you have a latent case, you won’t be experiencing symptoms.

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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