Wichita ? Almost a third of the tuberculosis cases reported in Kansas last year were in Sedgwick County, where health authorities are stepping up efforts to fight the disease.

The national TB rate has been dropping since 1995, from 8.7 cases for every 100,000 people to 5.2 in 2002. But in Kansas, the rate has increased from 3.1 in 1995 to 3.3 last year.

Last year Kansas saw 89 cases of TB, 29 of them in Sedgwick County. So far this year, the county has had 14 TB cases, said Peggy Baker, supervisor of the Sedgwick County Health Department’s tuberculosis control clinic.

Baker isn’t sure why the number of TB cases in Sedgwick County and Kansas has increased. The cases in the county cross all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Statewide, about 60 percent of the cases were in people born in other countries, and the majority were in people who’d been in the United States for two years or less.

Curing TB is labor-intensive, Baker said. A nurse must visit a patient each day for at least six months, to make sure medication is taken.

With one TB nurse and one interpreter, that doesn’t leave the department much time for TB prevention, Baker said.

“We do a very poor job of educating the community and doing prevention because we don’t have the time to do it.”

Now, the department is adding a second nurse to its staff, to focus more on prevention efforts. Last week the Sedgwick County Commission approved using grant money to pay the costs.

A person with active TB bacteria in his body can infect others by coughing, laughing, sneezing or even speaking in confined, poorly ventilated places. Family, friends and co-workers are at greatest risk because infection requires repeated exposure, not casual contact. The disease shows up in an X-ray of the lungs.

A person can carry the dormant form of the TB bacterium. He will have a “positive” skin test, but his lung X-ray will be normal. About $50 worth of treatment will keep 97 percent or more of people with the dormant TB bacteria from ever getting TB.