WEDNESDAY, Oct. 30, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- In the highest tally ever recorded for tuberculosis cases, the World Health Organization reported Tuesday that over 8 million people worldwide were diagnosed with the lung disease last year. Of that number, 1.
25 million people died of TB, the new report found, meaning that it is once again the leading cause of deaths 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 it, detect it and treat it,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in an agency news release .
“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.” Some countries are hit harder by the disease than others: It continues to mostly affect people in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Western Pacific. India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Pakistan account for more than half of the world’s cases, the WHO noted.
Who is most vulnerable? According to the report, 55% of people who developed TB were men, while 33% were women and 12% were children and young adolescents. Many of new TB cases were driven by five major risk factors: undernutrition, HIV infection, alcohol use disorders, smoking [especially among men] and diabetes. Tackling these issues, along with other social determinants such as poverty, requires a coordinated approach, the .