Global aid cuts are ‘crippling’ the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease, WHO says

More than two dozen countries are facing “crippling breakdowns” in their efforts to combat tuberculosis (TB) as global health aid is slashed, according to international health officials.

The “drastic and abrupt” cuts have jeopardised progress toward stamping out TB – the world’s deadliest infectious disease – and could lead to a global resurgence, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

TB is a bacterial infection that mainly affects the lungs but can also spread to other organs.

Some people who are infected with TB never go on to develop the disease, but it can have severe health consequences, killing about 1.25 million people every year.

Aid cuts are already affecting 27 countries, the WHO said, mostly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific.

That includes shortages of personnel for anti-TB services, disrupted diagnostic programmes leading to delayed detection and treatment, compromised disease surveillance, and slashed community-level work to identify infections and close contacts.

Nine countries are struggling to get TB medicine, which patients must take every day for four to six months in order for it to work.

Stopping treatment early can allow the TB bacteria to develop a tolerance to the drugs, making them less effective.

The consequences have been “devastating,” the WHO said.

Gains against TB now ‘at risk’

The WHO statement does not name the US but contains some of the agency’s starkest warnings yet on how the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to global health programmes, and its decision to pull out of the UN health agency, are reverberating across the developing world and beyond.

The US has been one of the world’s biggest donors to anti-TB programmes for more than two decades, meaning the recent cuts leave a major funding gap.

“The huge gains the world has made against TB over the past 20 years are now at risk as cuts to funding start to disrupt access to services for prevention, screening, and treatment for people with TB,” WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

Since 2000, an estimated 79 million lives have been saved due to global efforts to combat TB, according to the WHO.

But health experts have long warned that TB is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotic drugs, making it harder to treat.

Already, rising drug resistance in Europe and conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine are “exacerbating the situation for the most vulnerable,” the WHO said.