The incidence of tuberculosis (TB) reached an all-time low in 2012, with only 9,951 reported cases of TB last year in the United States, according to a new CDC report. This represents a 6.1 percent drop from 2011.

The provisional TB surveillance data indicated that 44.2% of counties in the United States didn’t report any new cases of TB between 2010 and 2012.

Foreign born people were 11.5 times more likely to suffer from TB compared to those born in the U.S. TB rates among Asians, Hispanics and Blacks were much higher than non-Hispanic Whites, according to the data published by the agency.

Although the number of TB cases fell below 10,000 for the first time since 1953, there is still much work to be done in order to fully eliminate the disease in the U.S. To achieve the goal, there needs to be more TB awareness and testing among segments of the population at risk.

The four states with the highest number of TB cases were California, Florida, Texas, and New York; together they made up nearly half of all cases. However, even in these states, a little more than 30 percent of the counties reported no new TB cases between 2010 to 2012.

The number of TB cases went down for U.S. born people by 8.2 percent compared with 2011, and 57.6 percent compared with 2000. The number of cases went down among foreign born people by 4.1 percent compared with 2011, and 18.1% compared with 2000.

More than half of the foreign-born people affected by TB originated from either Mexico, China, Vietnam, India, or the Philippines.

The TB case-rate among Asians was the highest of all ethnic groups, 25 times higher than the rate among whites, and a little more than 95 percent of them were foreign born.

The study also revealed that 5.6 percent of people with TB above the age of 15 were homeless within the past year and 12.1 percent reported excessive alcohol consumption.

In 2011 there were 127 cases of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR TB). There was a 0.3 percent increase in the percentage of people with MDR TB compared to 2010. Over the past few years the World Health Organization has successfully improved MDR-TB surveillance.

The WHO has also recently stated that while the overall prevalence of TB has gone down over the past years, the problem is that the bacterium is beginning to change and is increasingly becoming resistant to drugs that treat it.

Written by Joseph Nordqvist