Victorian-era disease becomes 'world's top killer' as urgent plea issued

A disease prominent during the Victorian era has become the world's 'top infectious disease killer', world health agencies have said.

More than eight million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis last year, the World Health Organisation 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. It added 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.

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.

And 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.

“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.

In the 19th century, TB killed at least one in seven people in England but UK health agencies say the UK is at 'the lowest numbers of TB ever', with just under 5,000 cases in 2018.