WEDNESDAY, Oct. 30, 2024 (HealthDay News) — The World Health Organization reports that tuberculosis (TB) cases hit a record high in 2023, with more than 8 million diagnoses and 1.25 million deaths, meaning 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 it, detect it, and treat it,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, M.D., 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.

According to the report, 55 percent of people who developed TB were men, while 33 percent were women and 12 percent were children and young adolescents. Many of the 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 WHO added.

“We are confronted with a multitude of formidable challenges: funding shortfalls and catastrophic financial burden on those affected, climate change, conflict, migration and displacement, pandemics, and drug-resistant tuberculosis, a significant driver of antimicrobial resistance,” Tereza Kasaeva, M.D., director of the WHO Global Tuberculosis Programme, said in the agency news release. “It is imperative that we unite across all sectors and stakeholders, to confront these pressing issues and ramp up our efforts.”

Global Tuberculosis Report 2024

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