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WHO today released its latest Global Tuberculosis Report, revealing TB remains the top infectious killer, with a record 8.2 million new diagnoses in 2023, up from 7.5 million in 2022. Although TB deaths fell slightly to 1.25 million, the disease continues to impact millions, with 10.8 million people becoming ill in 2023. India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, and Pakistan account for over half of cases, while treatment gaps persist, especially for multidrug-resistant TB.
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged countries to honour commitments to end TB, emphasising that effective tools to prevent, detect, and treat TB already exist.
“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,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “WHO urges all countries to make good on the concrete commitments they have made to expand the use of those tools, and to end TB.”
In 2023, the gap between estimated and reported TB cases narrowed to 2.7 million from 4 million in 2020-21, thanks to global recovery efforts post-COVID. TB preventive treatment coverage remains steady for people with HIV and is improving for household contacts. However, multidrug-resistant TB is still a crisis; treatment success reached 68%, yet only 44% of the estimated 400,000 MDR/RR-TB cases were diagnosed and treated.
Read the full report by clicking the link below: