--- title: Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis is a Major Health Threat description: The world is mobilizing to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. canonical: https://time.com/6317647/tuberculosis-pandemic-threat/ author: Anna Gordon article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-09-26T17:30:33.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:52.638Z article:section: Health og:title: Tuberculosis Could Be the Next Pandemic. Is the World Ready? og:description: The world is mobilizing to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. og:url: https://time.com/6317647/tuberculosis-pandemic-threat/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt005cde7d7ea10502/698a40b809208fd31c41ac30/Tuberculosis-UN-meeting.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 6000 og:image:height: 3375 og:image:alt: UN General Assembly High Level Meeting on Tuberculosis og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Tuberculosis Could Be the Next Pandemic. Is the World Ready? twitter:description: The world is mobilizing to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt005cde7d7ea10502/698a40b809208fd31c41ac30/Tuberculosis-UN-meeting.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Tuberculosis Could Be the Next Global Health Crisis. Is the World Ready? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. 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It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: It's Been a Pretty Rocky Road.' CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Reflects on Her Tenure During COVID-19 [Watch (HLS stream): It's Been a Pretty Rocky Road.' CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Reflects on Her Tenure During COVID-19](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/YaLbk7xu.m3u8) (8:52)  _Published 2023-06-27. Dr. Rochelle Walensky became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in January 2021, a fraught time in the country’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic._ by [Anna Gordon](https://time.com/author/anna-gordon/) ## Anna Gordon Gordon was a reporter for TIME, based in the London bureau. Sep 26, 2023 5:30 PM UTC  The United Nations General Assembly's high-level meeting on the fight against tuberculosis TB is held at the UN headquarters in New York, on Sept. 22, 2023\. World leaders at the United Nations General Assembly's high-level meeting on the fight against tuberculosis TB on Friday approved a political declaration to advance efforts to end the disease by 2030. The United Nations General Assembly's high-level meeting on the fight against tuberculosis TB is held at the UN headquarters in New York, on Sept. 22, 2023\. World leaders at the United Nations General Assembly's high-level meeting on the fight against tuberculosis TB on Friday approved a political declaration to advance efforts to end the disease by 2030. Liu Jie–Xinhua/Getty Images by [Anna Gordon](https://time.com/author/anna-gordon/) ## Anna Gordon Gordon was a reporter for TIME, based in the London bureau. Sep 26, 2023 5:30 PM UTC For those living in affluent countries, it’s easy to forget about tuberculosis, which seems like a disease of the Victorian era. In the U.S., thanks to investments in public health and TB surveillance infrastructure, less than 600 people died from the disease in 2020\. Compared to COVID-19, which caused 350,000 deaths that same year, it’s understandable why it's not at the top of the U.S. public health agenda. But if you zoom out and look at global public health, TB gets much more scary. It is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing approximately 1.5 million people per year, [reclaiming the top spot](https://www.sciencealert.com/the-worlds-biggest-infectious-killer-regains-its-deadly-lead) from COVID-19 in October 2022\. Experts warn that while the spread of TB might seem confined to developing countries right now, its unchecked spread could lead to mutations which result in more drug resistant versions of the disease. That’s something that could be highly disruptive to rich countries, too. As a result, the world health community is mobilizing, and last week concluded the second-ever [United Nations high-level meeting](https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2023/09/22/default-calendar/the-second-united-nations-high-level-meeting-on-the-fight-to-end-tuberculosis) focused on taming the disease. In a major breakthrough, a manufacturer of testing equipment agreed to lower the price of its devices, expanding testing to millions more. ### More From TIME ## A highly contagious disease TB is caused when the tuberculosis bacteria spreads in the lungs. Anyone can get the disease, including healthy people, but those who are malnourished, living in crowded living conditions, or are immunocompromised are most susceptible. If untreated, a person with TB will spread the disease to an average of 15 people per year. Most often, patients will first notice that they are sick when they begin experiencing a persistent cough that lasts weeks, sudden weight loss, or a high fever. Without treatment, approximately half of those with TB disease would die within five years. “TB knows no borders,” says Dr. Lucica Ditiu, Executive Director of Stop TB Partnership, a U.N. hosted organization that aligns global funding agencies, NGOs, and civil society groups working on ending TB. “I keep telling everyone, you can eat healthy, you can be vegan or vegetarian. You can run, you can use a condom, and you can sleep under a bed net. But so long as you breathe, you can still catch TB.” In the 20th century, multiple new antibiotics were created to cure TB disease but with each case of TB, the bacteria has the chance to continue multiplying in the body of its human host. Sometimes, during the reproduction process, some strains of the bacteria will develop traits that make it resistant to antibiotics. The most recent data suggests that 3.6% of all new tuberculosis cases today are resistant to multiple TB drugs. **_Read More:_**[_How an Innovative Deal Will Give Millions Access to Cheaper Tuberculosis Drugs_](https://time.com/6295511/how-an-innovative-deal-will-give-millions-access-to-cheaper-tuberculosis-drugs/) Multidrug-resistant TB has a [higher mortality rate](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36591001/#:~:text=Results%3A%20among%20150%20MDR%2DTB,CI%3D%206.74%2D17.52%29.), and doctors are often forced to resort to using more toxic drugs with severe side effects to treat the disease. Some have been known to cause total deafness in patients. Two years ago, a groundbreaking study found that TB, once thought to be spread by coughing, [spreads primarily through breathing](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/health/tuberculosis-transmission-aerosols.html). Every time an infected person exhales, they propel aerosols containing the bacteria into the air. Crowded indoor spaces, like prisons, are especially fertile breeding grounds for TB, just like COVID. TB is much less contagious than COVID, but the more it mutates, the more chances it has to acquire mutations that make it more contagious. “There’s no biological reason that multi-drug-resistant TB can't acquire what it takes to transmit easily,” says David Bishai, the director of the school of public health at the University of Hong Kong. “We know that ancestral TB was extremely contagious through airborne methods. And so this does represent a pandemic threat.” On Sept. 22, the United Nations held a high-level meeting on TB, where countries reported on the progress achieved so far and revealed their plans for tackling the disease over the next five years. Currently, the international community has [set a target](https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/the-end-tb-strategy) for reducing global TB cases by 80% by the year 2030\. Prominent TB activists attended the meeting as well, including writer and YouTuber John Green. ## Social media pressure Green, author of _The Fault in Our Stars,_ has launched multiple social media campaigns aimed at getting major companies to reduce their pricing of TB tests and drugs in lower and middle income countries. “In the 21st century, you can’t say that tuberculosis deaths are even caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis because we know how to kill that bacteria,” said Green. “Death from tuberculosis is caused by human choice. It's caused by human built systems...It means we're not doing a good job of assigning equal value to every human life. But it's also hopeful in the sense that if we are the cause of tuberculosis, we may also be the cure.” Last week, activists scored a major win when Danaher, a U.S. company which manufactures test cartridges that make TB testing more affordable and accurate, [announced it would reduce the price](https://investors.danaher.com/2023-09-19-Danaher-to-Provide-Cepheids-Tuberculosis-Test-to-the-Global-Fund-at-Cost#:~:text=By%20reducing%20the%20price%20of,testing%20where%20it%20matters%20most.) of each cartridge from $9.98 to $7.97\. Ditiu of the Stop TB Partnership says that this means that countries around the world will be able to provide an additional 5 million tests. Approximately one in every 13 TB tests administered comes back positive, according to Ditiu. “Every person can infect up to 15 others per year,” says Ditiu. “If we can find people with TB as early as possible and diagnose them, we can put them on treatment and stop this chain of transmission.” Ditiu estimates that approximately 300,000 people will be diagnosed earlier thanks to the reduced price of Danaher’s test cartridges. ## Transcript I knew I had a hard task ahead of me. I did not go into this naive. Not not all the things that I thought would be hard, work, hard and things that I didn't expect to be hard ended up being harder. I did not expect the sort of that there would be so many people who were working to undermine the methods of science. The message of Public Health in Ferris actors who really were working to undermine what good health would look like for individuals and for the country that was harder than I thought it would be. Give me what we have now. The vaccines you do natural immunity from people who are getting exposed infected as well. And now drugs, if you mentioned up where should we be in a much better place than we are now in terms of the pandemic or are we were, you would think we should be two and a half years? Three years into the pandemic? Well, I would say we are in a much better place than we were for sure. Are with over 95% of people having a munity of one flavor, or the another, and many people have immunity both related to Prior vaccination or prior infection. I'm so a lot of protection out there, but we also know, as with all respiratory viruses, they are likely to circulate some, they may very well circulate a little bit more over the fall. When respiratory virus is 10 to thrive and weird cities, he will continue to be. So Gillette take out the message out of all the things that people can do to protect themselves. And I think the public now knows what those things are information. I think in general undermining, we can do what we were working to do to get people out of the pandemic to get People Protected. I'm and now also. I see no blood into pediatric vaccination as well. And so are, you know, when vaccine is like a Cornerstone of what we do in prevention and prevention of infectious threats and that by its very nature, not just in covid been another things is being challenged, I don't know that we could have rewound, the clock, two and a half years ago and said, this incredible thing that we are celebrating with how well this vaccine worked and how this was really going to be among the most important things to get us out of this. Pandemic does that, what is somehow turned into people weaponizing it for political gain when it comes to we really had messages from from a group, right? The briefings came from the White House. Dr. Fauci at NIH HHS and sometimes the Surgeon General as well as you Spell, funeralized director of the CDC. How did that decision to make it a group in a briefing versus? Did you argue for example, that the CDC should be the voice that there should be a single voice and would not have helped in terms of reducing some of the confusion and the misperception there, if the public had kind of one place to go? Yeah, I think one could say that, you know, how did that? How was it? How were those decisions made it was intentional because very much we were all on the same page and we wanted to make sure that America heard that all of us were on the same page that the scientists it. And I ate and the Surgeon General and HHS and CDC, we were in agreement with the things that we were staying and that unit to find message. I think is really critically important, especially when the other message out there was this is confusing. So, we really wanted to have one voice. One scientific voice from the scientific agencies. You have said that something like covid-19 is too big for a single agency, like CBC to manage alone. And that, you know, you can't make us there can't be a good solution in isolation. Like an agency can act and isolation, I wonder if you can comment on and help the public better understand what the CDC can and cannot do. You know, I think a lot of the criticism of the agency has come from expectations that the public had, you know, on what the CDC should be doing or telling them, I wonder, if you could help us understand a bit like a better understanding of what the agency 10 doing, what, I can't, I really appreciate this question because I think that this is lost on not only every day, I know the American public but even scientists who are engaged and asking for, for things from CBC. So I guess, and this is among the things we are doing so much work and CDC moving forward, but among the things, Graphing for Congressional help on so that we can be a Nimble agency. We have real challenges in our Workforce and the authorities that we have in our work force, our ability to pay overtime, our ability to pay danger, pay if we have an employee, that is working in a bowl of lading District, you know, helping a community. We can't do those sorts of things. It is very hard to be nimble with a response based work for us when we don't have a capacity weigh other response, based agencies have so Workforce has a real challenge. The other one has data, we do not we receive data voluntarily at CDC though. We have 3000 jurisdictions, that send us data sometimes it's standardized. Sometimes it's not sometimes it comes back, sometimes my email sometimes by web. So there are lots of different ways that we receive data and we cannot compel that day that Thursday that have come to us during the public health emergency. We were able to get more data because of the public health emergency, but one of the things I really have become accustomed to saying is when people ask, we want to see the data from CDC. Please also asked the question, the CDC actually, opted, get the data that you're looking to get from CDC. Because oftentimes, we don't, I'm, and that is really, we, we want those dated to come in a privacy protected way. We don't want an individual information, but we do want to be able to stay in jurisdiction acts. There's an outbreak next to in jurisdiction. Why? You should be looking for it too. If those data don't come to us and CDC, we can't put it back out to to Jose Tequilas at the state and local Health departments and you held the agency. You know what, you said a very historic moment and arguably, we're kind of at the tail end of that. Now, why did you decide now is the time to step down while? So it's been it's been an extraordinary 10 year when I came in, it was really about getting the agency to country in the world out of the darkest days. The pandemic we have been conquering race of infectious threats. I think unlike any we have seen throughout history, certainly, I knew I was coming into a conqueror covid-19 and Alta monkeypox came first, a case of parallel polio in the country. Assumed an ebola outbreak in Uganda to Marburg. Outbreaks in Equatorial, Guinea in Tanzania. The rate of Public Health. Threats has really been enormous over the last two-and-a-half years. One of the other things that we really did during my tenure was CDC moving forward, and that is sort of our strategy and plan for how we take, where we are in public health at CDC, and across the country, and payment to be the public health agency of the future. What is said that we've the lessons that we learn CDC has been around only for 76 years. They weren't around for the last pandemic. I'm so what is it that we have learned? How do we become the public health agency? That the America deserves and desires until we did a lot of that work over the last year. And I feel like I've charted the course. Now for what we need to do in the future, much of that work has already been accomplished done, is is ongoing. And you know what became very clear to me was that this work will take longer than a year. It'll take longer than two. We need to be able to be adaptable as new scientific movies or merge. And so, it's important to me, was to have a legacy where I talked about what do we need to be doing, what is the this inflection point? And so we want that. But I also think that we have done a lot of work in the agency to demonstrate where you know where we can fill voids and communication and fill it with important scientific information. So that when that void is there that we filled it before some nefarious actor may come in and fill it for us until I think of that has been critically important. This is going to be something that we have to keep a very close eye on because Are people who are very much want to undermine and it's not the CDC and it's not just NIH. It is all of Academia and all of science. That is really struggling with this right now. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6317647/tuberculosis-pandemic-threat/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6317647/tuberculosis-pandemic-threat/"},"headline":"Tuberculosis Could Be the Next Global Health Crisis. 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