The U.S. tuberculosis rate hit an all-time low in 2008, but the infection continues to disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants, Reuters quoted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as reporting today. The CDC said 12,898 new cases were reported in 2008, also a new low, with 41 percent of those cases among people born in the United States. "The TB rate declined 3.8 percent from 2007 to 4.2 cases per 100,000 population, the lowest rate recorded since national reporting began in 1953," the CDC team wrote in the organization's weekly report on death and disease. "In 2008, the number of TB cases and annual TB rate reached all-time lows in the United States." "TB continues to disproportionately affect racial/ethnic minorities and foreign-born persons," the CDC team, led by Robert Pratt of the Division of TB Elimination, wrote in the report. More than 10 percent of people who have tested positive for the AIDS virus had TB; the immune suppression caused by HIV can make a person far more susceptible to TB. The AIDS epidemic drove up the number of cases in the United States in the 1990s and is still doing so globally.
