Tuberculosis
The deadliest infectious disease in the world, curable but persistently underfunded.
Severity score
55.2
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Improving
What this is
Tuberculosis remains the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. It is curable with a months-long drug regimen, but detection gaps, treatment interruption, HIV co-infection and rising multidrug resistance keep the toll high. The burden is concentrated in India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and South Africa.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
88Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
72People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
35Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
5Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
30Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.