Tuberculosis infected eight million people last year – most WHO has ever tracked

More than eight million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis last year, the World Health Organisation has said, the highest number recorded since the UN health agency began keeping track.

About 1.25 million people died of TB last year, the new report said, adding that TB likely returned to being the world’s top infectious disease killer after being replaced by Covid-19 during the pandemic.

The deaths are almost double the number of people killed by HIV in 2023.

WHO said TB continues to mostly affect people in south-east Asia, Africa and the Western Pacific; India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Pakistan account for more than half of the world’s cases.

“The fact that TB still kills and sickens so many people is an outrage, when we have the tools to prevent it, detect it and treat it,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

TB deaths continue to fall globally, however, and the number of people being newly infected is beginning to stabilise.

The agency noted that of the 400,000 people estimated to have drug-resistant TB last year, fewer than half were diagnosed and treated.

Tuberculosis is caused by airborne bacteria that mostly affects the lungs. Roughly a quarter of the global population is estimated to have TB, but only about 5–10% of those develop symptoms.

Advocacy groups, including Doctors Without Borders, have long called for the US company Cepheid, which produces TB tests used in poorer countries, to make them available for five dollars per test to increase availability.

Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders and 150 global health partners sent Cepheid an open letter calling on them to “prioritise people’s lives” and to urgently help make TB testing more widespread globally.