Nikhil Prasad Fact checked by:Thailand Medical News Team Oct 09, 2025 2 hours, 25 minutes ago
Medical News: Tuberculosis Makes a Grim Comeback
Tuberculosis (TB), one of humanity’s oldest and deadliest infectious diseases, has once again become the leading infectious killer worldwide, surpassing even COVID-19 in 2023. According to researchers from the Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, University of Utah, Brazilian Tuberculosis Research Network, Universidade de Lisboa, and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, nearly 1.25 million people died from TB last year, while 8.2 million new cases were reported globally. These alarming figures mark the highest TB burden since 1995, when the World Health Organization (WHO) began systematic global monitoring. Between 2015 and 2023, TB incidence in the Americas surged by 20%, while mortality rose by 44%, making it the region with the steepest increase in deaths.
Tuberculosis Crisis Deepens in Latin America Amid Weak Genomic Tracking
Why Tuberculosis Still Persists
Despite being preventable and curable, TB continues to thrive in communities struggling with poverty, limited healthcare access, and social inequality. Contributing factors include delayed diagnosis, lack of patient support during lengthy treatment courses, and the growing threat of drug-resistant TB. Recent advances—such as new drugs like bedaquiline, linezolid, and pretomanid—offer some hope. However, without strong genomic surveillance to monitor resistance, their long-term effectiveness remains uncertain. In the middle of this worsening scenario, this
Medical News report highlights how the absence of coordinated disease-tracking programs could undermine decades of progress against TB.
Gaps in Genomic Surveillance
During the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries in Latin America invested in genomic surveillance infrastructure to monitor viral outbreaks, including dengue and Oropouche. Yet, despite similar potential for TB tracking, genomic monitoring for Mycobacterium tuberculosis remains patchy and uncoordinated. Local research teams have independently identified worrying patterns—such as the spread of highly multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) strains, and the role of prisons in fueling community transmission—but these findings are fragmented. Without a unified system to analyze and share genomic data, health officials cannot accurately map transmission or detect new resistance mutations early enough to intervene effectively.
Political and Economic Barriers Slow Action
The main obstacles to expanding TB genomic surveillance are not scientific but political and financial. Even in high-burden nations like Brazil, where genomic tools for COVID-19 were successfully deployed, there is still no national strategy to apply similar methods to TB. The study’s authors stress that implementing surveillance at scale requires cooperation between governments, research institutions, and international health agencies. Funding is needed to establish regional sequencing hubs, standardize data protocols, and integrate findings into public health databases.
U
rgent Need for Coordinated Global Response
Experts warn that unless governments commit to sustained investment, TB mortality will continue to climb, undoing decades of progress made under the WHO’s End TB Strategy. With available technologies and the lessons learned from pandemic surveillance, the tools to turn the tide already exist. What is missing, researchers argue, is the political will to act decisively and protect vulnerable communities.
The study findings were published in the peer reviewed journal: The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667193X25002777
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https://www.thailandmedical.news/articles/tuberculosis-tb-news
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