Deaths from tuberculosis fell last year amid a dramatic increase in diagnosis and treatment of the world’s second deadliest disease, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
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Tuberculosis deaths rebounded in 2020 and 2021 after years of decline as disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic made diagnostics and treatments harder to access, WHO says in a new report on disease.
The UN health agency estimates that these disruptions had led to almost half a million additional deaths between 2020 and 2022, even though tuberculosis is preventable and generally curable.
But in its new report, the WHO welcomed “a major recovery in the number of people diagnosed” and treated last year, an “encouraging trend” that “is beginning to reverse the harmful effects of disruptions due to COVID-19 “.
The organization warns, however, that last year, tuberculosis remained the second leading cause of infectious disease death globally, after COVID-19, and claimed nearly twice as many lives as HIV/AIDS. .
The disease, caused by a bacteria that most often affects the lungs and transmitted through the air, therefore caused fewer deaths in 2022: around 1.3 million, compared to around 1.4 million in 2020 and 2021. But the WHO stresses that the number of new tuberculosis infections continues to increase.
Worldwide, an estimated 10.6 million people developed tuberculosis last year, compared to about 10.3 million in 2021 and 10.0 million in 2020. New infections could start to decline again, according to the WHO. this year or next year.
“For millennia, our ancestors suffered and died from tuberculosis, without knowing what it was, what caused it or how to stop it,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO.
“Today we have knowledge and tools they could only have dreamed of. We have (…) the opportunity to write the last chapter in the history of tuberculosis,” he added.
The global gap between the estimated number of people developing TB and the reported number of newly diagnosed people narrowed in 2022 to around 3.1 million cases, compared to around four million in 2020 and 2021.
Thus in 2022, 7.5 million people were diagnosed, i.e. 16% more than in 2021 and 28% more than in 2020. This is the highest assessment since the WHO began surveillance of the disease in the mid-1990s, but this increase demonstrates, according to the WHO, a recovery in access to health services in many countries.
Globally, the incidence rate, which refers to the number of new cases per 100,000 people each year, stood at 133 last year, a net reduction of 8.7% since 2015 but still far from the WHO strategic objective of a 50% reduction by 2025.
Two-thirds of the total global TB burden is borne by just eight countries: India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Global Fund, a partnership created in 2002 to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, welcomed these results. “Today we have reason to hope,” Global Fund head Peter Sands said in a statement.