iStockphoto
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says tuberculosis (TB) cases are on the rise in the state. Three people in the Greater Portland area, all unrelated, have been infected with the world’s deadliest disease.
The three people in the state that were infected got tuberculosis from different sources. Lindsay Hammes, spokesperson for the Maine CDC, said the three active cases are not genetically linked, which means that they were also not transmitted from one person to another.
Health officials currently are trying to identify and screen any people who may have come into contact with the infected individuals. They also stated that rumors of a tuberculosis outbreak at the Portland shelter for asylum seekers are not true.
Statement from the Maine CDC
“As the Maine CDC does for all TB cases, we are doing contact investigations and identifying individuals who may be at highest risk; for those individuals deemed at highest risk, the Maine CDC recommends screening by a medical professional,” Hammes told News Center Maine. “Per our protocol, the Maine CDC also notified infection preventionists at hospitals about the potential for people coming to be screened. The Maine CDC’s Public Health Nursing team also recently held a TB screening event in Portland.”
While there is no current outbreak in the state – the cases in Maine do not meet the criteria needed to classify them as an outbreak, there have been a total of 28 cases of tuberculosis reported in Maine in 2025 through the end of July. In 2024, there were 10,347 reported cases of tuberculosis in the United States. That was the highest number of tuberculosis infections in the country since 2011 when there were 10,471 cases recorded.
Tuberculosis symptoms and treatment
The World Health Organization calls tuberculosis the “world’s top infectious killer,” causing the deaths of about 1.25 million people every year, the majority occurring in developing countries. This despite the fact that the disease can be prevented by vaccines and treated with antibiotics. The vaccine is not usually given in the U.S. due to the low likelihood of Americans contracting the disease.
Common symptoms of tuberculosis include a prolonged cough, chest pain, weakness of fatigue, weight loss, fever, and night sweats. The longer it goes untreated, the higher the risk of spreading the infection to others. It is typically treated by a six-month course of four antibiotics, unless it is drug-resistant tuberculosis, which requires longer and more complex treatment. In some cases, however, the treatment can be shortened to only one or three months.
The concern over tuberculosis in Maine comes on the heels of a report about flesh-eating bacteria cases also being on the rise in the United States. In New York, an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease has been keeping health officials busy. And in California, some residents there have contracted the plague, putting health officials and residents on alert there as well.