By Joyce Ojanji
In the highest tally ever recorded for tuberculosis (TB) cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that over eight million people worldwide were diagnosed with lung disease in 2023, highlighting the challenges in the global effort to eradicate the disease.
According to the new Global Tuberculosis Report 2024, 1.25 million of those diagnosed, died of TB, meaning that it is once again the leading cause of death from infectious disease after COVID-19 displaced it briefly during the pandemic.
“The fact that TB still kills and sickens so many people is an outrage when we have the tools to prevent, detect and treat it.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,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted.
WHO notes that some countries are hit harder by the disease than others. People in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Western Pacific. India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Pakistan are the most affected accounting for more than half of the world’s cases.
The data shows that eradicating tuberculosis is still a distant goal as the fight against the disease faces persistent challenges such as significant underfunding, according to the report.
While the number of deaths related to the disease fell to 1.25 million in 2023 from 1.32 million in 2022, the total number of people falling ill rose slightly to an estimated 10.8 million in 2023.
Global milestones and targets for reducing the disease burden are off-track, and considerable progress is needed to reach other targets set for 2027. Low- and middle-income countries, which bear 98% of the burden of the disease, faced significant funding shortages, the report said.
Additionally, multidrug-resistant TB remains a public health crisis. Treatment success rates for multidrug-resistant or rifampicin-resistant TB [MDR/RR-TB] have now reached 68%. But, of the 400,000 people estimated to have developed MDR/RR-TB, only 44% were diagnosed and treated in 2023, WHO noted.
Globally, TB research remains severely underfunded with only one-fifth of the US$ 5 billion annual target reached in 2022. This impedes the development of new TB diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. WHO continues leading efforts to advance the TB vaccine agenda, including with the support of the TB Vaccine Accelerator Council launched by the WHO Director-General.
TB is caused by airborne bacteria that mostly attack the lungs. Roughly a quarter of the global population is estimated to have TB, but only about 5% to 10% of those develop symptoms, the WHO said.
People with TB infection often don’t feel sick and aren’t contagious. Only a small proportion of people who are infected with TB will experience symptoms, with babies and children at higher risk.
A significant number of new TB cases are driven by five major risk factors: undernutrition, HIV infection, alcohol use disorders, smoking (especially among men), and diabetes. Tackling these issues, along with critical determinants like poverty and GDP per capita, requires coordinated multisectoral action.
TB symptoms may be mild for many months, so it is easy to spread the disease to others without knowing it.
