After two years of Covid-related disruptions, there was a major global recovery in the number of people diagnosed with TB and treated in 2022, but infections remain the world's second leading cause of death, according to a WHO 2023 Global TB Report released on Wednesday. The net reduction from 2015 to 2022 was 8.7%, far from the WHO End TB Strategy milestone of a 50% reduction by 2025.
Situation in India too was not impressive as it accounted for the highest number of infections, representing a staggering 27 percent of the global burden, as per the report, featuring data from 192 countries and areas. However, on a brighter side, the WHO acknowledged India's success in declining TB cases by 16% and TB mortality by 18% since 2015.
India also improved in treatment coverage to 80 per cent of the estimated TB cases, said the report.
However, overall the report has called for accelerated efforts to achieve new targets. The report showed that India, Indonesia and the Philippines, which together accounted for over 60 per cent of the global reductions in the number of people newly diagnosed with TB in 2020 and 2021, all recovered to beyond 2019 levels in 2022.
According to the report, India recorded 2.8 million (28.2 lakh) TB cases in 2022, with a case fatality ratio of 12 per cent. Officials stated that "The best estimate of the number of deaths in India from TB was 3,42,000 (3,31,000 among HIV-negative people and 11,000 among those with HIV)."
The report highlights that multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) remains a public health crisis, with 1.1 lakh cases recorded in India in 2022. "For millennia, our ancestors suffered and died with tuberculosis, without knowing what it was, what caused it, or how to stop it," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, in the statement.
"Today, we have knowledge and tools they could only have dreamed of. We have political commitment, and we have an opportunity that no generation in the history of humanity has had: the opportunity to write the final chapter in the story of TB," he added.
Globally, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with TB in 2022, up from 10.3 million in 2021.
Geographically, in 2022, most people who developed TB were in the WHO Regions of South-East Asia (46 per cent), Africa (23 per cent) and the Western Pacific (18 per cent), with smaller proportions in the Eastern Mediterranean (8.1 per cent), the Americas (3.1 per cent) and Europe (2.2 per cent).
The total number of TB-related deaths (including those among people with HIV) was 1.3 million in 2022, down from 1.4 million in 2021.
However, during the 2020-2022 period, Covid-19 disruptions resulted in nearly half a million more deaths from TB. TB continues to be the leading killer among people with HIV.