Tuberculosis deaths have fallen 29 percent since 2015

Between 2015 and 2024, the number of people killed each year by tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection that most often attacks the lungs and spreads through the air when people with the disease cough, sneeze or spit, fell by 29 percent. That is the net change reported in the World Health Organization's Global Tuberculosis Report 2025, published in November 2025. The toll is still heavy. An estimated 1.23 million people died of TB in 2024, including 150,000 people with HIV, and it remains the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent.

The fall was steepest in two places. Across the WHO African Region, one of the six regions WHO groups its member states into, TB deaths fell by 46 percent over the same nine years. The European Region cut them by 49 percent. Worldwide, 65 countries reduced TB deaths by 35 percent or more, which WHO counts as reaching the first milestones of its End TB Strategy, the plan that set targets for cutting TB against a 2015 baseline.

The most recent year kept the direction. Deaths fell by 3 percent between 2023 and 2024, and the report puts them 13.8 percent below 2021, when disruption to diagnosis and treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic had pushed them up. Behind the decade sits a longer record: WHO estimates that timely treatment has saved 83 million lives since 2000.

How we know

The figures are WHO estimates, built mainly from data that 184 countries and areas, together holding more than 99 percent of the world's population and TB cases, reported to WHO in 2025. Deaths are estimated in two parts. Deaths among people without HIV are counted as TB deaths; deaths among people with HIV are classified as HIV deaths with TB as a contributing cause, and the report adds the two to reach the 1.23 million total.

Counting who falls ill is harder than counting diagnoses, because not every case is found or reported. So WHO tracks the incidence rate, the number of people newly falling ill with TB for every 100,000 people in a year, and estimates it with several methods: national TB surveys in 28 countries that together hold 40 percent of cases, a country-specific model for India, studies measuring how many detected cases go unreported, and adjusted national case records. The global incidence rate fell by 1.7 percent between 2023 and 2024, and by 12.3 percent since 2015.

Care is reaching more people. In 2024, 8.3 million people were newly diagnosed and started treatment, about 78 percent of everyone who fell ill that year. CIDRAP, the University of Minnesota's infectious disease news centre, reported that figure as up from 8.2 million in 2023. The share of diagnoses made with rapid tests rose from 48 to 54 percent, and treatment for TB that responds to the standard medicines succeeded in 88 percent of cases. For drug-resistant TB, where the bacteria no longer respond to some of those standard medicines, more than 164,000 people were treated and the success rate rose to 71 percent, up from 68 percent. Some 5.3 million people at high risk received preventive treatment, given before they fall ill, up from 4.7 million in 2023.

Why it matters

TB is preventable and curable, and it can be fatal without treatment, so each death it causes is one that existing medicine could have stopped. The last decade shows where the falls come from. Since 2015, 101 countries have cut their incidence rate by more than 20 percent, and 30 have cut it by at least half, including South Africa, one of the countries WHO lists as carrying a high burden of the disease.

The global picture is slower. The End TB Strategy aimed for a 75 percent cut in deaths and a 50 percent cut in the incidence rate between 2015 and 2025; the report shows 29 percent and 12.3 percent. The disease is also concentrated: 30 countries held 87 percent of the people who fell ill in 2024, and eight of them, led by India with 25 percent, held 67 percent. Drug-resistant TB is a gap of its own: WHO's fact sheet says only about 2 in 5 people with it accessed treatment in 2024.

Money is the obstacle WHO names first. Funding for prevention, diagnosis and treatment has stayed flat since 2020, and the US$5.9 billion available in 2024 was just over a quarter of the US$22 billion annual target set for 2027. Modelling studies warn that lasting cuts to international donor funding could mean up to 2 million additional deaths between 2025 and 2035. The pipeline, meanwhile, is fuller than it was: 29 TB drugs were in clinical trials as of August 2025, up from 8 in 2015, and 18 vaccine candidates were in trials. The decline since 2015 shows what diagnosis and treatment can do when they are paid for. Whether the funding holds is now the open question.