Tuberculosis killed an estimated 1.23 million people in 2024, making it the deadliest single infectious agent on the planet. That figure includes 150,000 deaths among people also living with HIV. Despite being curable with antibiotics, TB continues to claim more lives each year than HIV, malaria, or any other single pathogen.
Global Deaths in 2024
Of the 1.23 million TB deaths recorded globally in 2024, roughly 1.08 million occurred in people who were HIV-negative. The remaining 150,000 deaths happened in people co-infected with both TB and HIV, a combination that makes both diseases significantly harder to survive. These numbers have remained stubbornly high for years. In 2022, the global toll was 1.3 million, with 170,000 of those deaths among people living with HIV.
To put the scale in perspective, TB kills more than 3,300 people every single day. That’s roughly one death every 26 seconds, year-round.
Children and Young Adolescents
An estimated 174,000 children and young adolescents under 15 died from TB in 2024. The vast majority of these deaths, about 172,000, occurred in children who were HIV-negative. Around 2,300 were in children also living with HIV. Childhood TB is particularly tragic because it is almost entirely preventable with early detection and treatment, yet many children in high-burden countries are never diagnosed.
Drug-Resistant TB
Not all TB responds to standard antibiotics. Multidrug-resistant and rifampicin-resistant TB (forms of the disease that don’t respond to the two most effective first-line drugs) caused an estimated 150,000 deaths in 2024. Treatment for drug-resistant TB takes longer, involves more toxic medications, and has lower success rates. For patients in low-resource settings, a drug-resistant diagnosis can be especially dangerous because the second-line treatments are harder to access and more expensive.
The HIV Connection
TB and HIV fuel each other. HIV weakens the immune system in a way that makes latent TB infections far more likely to become active disease. In 2023, 630,000 of the 7.5 million new TB cases worldwide were in people co-infected with HIV. The overlap is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV prevalence is highest. Even with treatment for both diseases running simultaneously, people with TB-HIV co-infection face higher mortality than those with TB alone.
What Happens Without Treatment
Without any medical treatment, roughly half of all people who develop active TB will die from it. That 50% fatality rate explains why TB was one of humanity’s biggest killers for centuries before antibiotics existed. With proper treatment, the vast majority of people with drug-sensitive TB recover fully, typically after a course of antibiotics lasting six months. The gap between that 50% untreated death rate and the high survival rate with treatment highlights how many of today’s deaths are fundamentally a failure of access, not of medicine.
Progress Toward Global Targets
The WHO’s End TB Strategy set ambitious goals: reduce TB deaths by 90% compared to 2015 levels by 2030. The world is not on track. While death counts have declined modestly from their peak, the pace of reduction falls well short of what’s needed. The COVID-19 pandemic set things back further by disrupting TB diagnosis and treatment programs in many countries, leading to a temporary spike in deaths around 2020 and 2021 that the global response is still recovering from.
The strategy also calls for all countries to reach 90% or higher targets for treatment coverage, treatment success rates, and preventive treatment uptake by 2025 at the latest. Most high-burden countries remain far from these benchmarks. The tools to prevent TB deaths exist. The challenge is getting them to the people who need them, particularly in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority of TB deaths occur.