Global TB Report 2026: Nearly 10.6 million fell ill with TB worldwide; India accounts for 25% of cases

An estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with tuberculosis (TB) worldwide in 2025, a decline of 75,000 from the previous year, while India continued to account for about a quarter of the global disease burden, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report 2026, released on Thursday.The report also noted a 38% reduction in TB deaths in India since 2015, compared with a 35% decline globally.The global TB, the report added, incidence rate declined by 1.6% between 2024 and 2025, from 131 to 129 cases per one lakh people.

However, the reduction remains far below the World Health Organization’s End TB Strategy milestones, which called for a 50% decline in TB incidence by 2025 and an 80% reduction by 2030, compared with 2015 levels. Between 2015 and 2025, the global incidence rate fell by 14%.Tuberculosis remained the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent worldwide and ranked 13th among all causes of death, the report said.

The 30 countries with a high TB burden accounted for 88% of the estimated global cases in 2025. Eight countries accounted for about two-thirds of the total, with India alone contributing nearly a quarter, followed by Indonesia (10%), the Philippines (6.8%), China (6.5%), Pakistan (6.4%), Nigeria (4.9%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.9%) and Bangladesh (3.7%).The top five countries accounted for more than 50% of the global total, data showed.India’s progress in TB prevention and treatmentIndia carries roughly a quarter of the global TB burden.

The report, however, noted the country’s overall progress.“In recent years, the National TB Elimination Programme in India has made substantial efforts to improve TB prevention and care, with the goal of accelerating reductions in TB mortality and TB incidence… India has established a system for district-level sentinel surveillance of population-level trends in the prevalence of TB disease and TB infection,” it said.Last year’s report also highlighted progress in India.

Despite carrying the world’s largest TB burden, India outpaced global progress on key indicators. Between 2015 and 2024, India’s TB incidence fell by 21%, nearly twice the global rate, while deaths fell by 25% and treatment coverage rose from 53% to 92%.The Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) National TB Prevalence Survey found that nearly half of people with TB have no symptoms.

In response, India shifted its focus from waiting for patients to visit clinics to actively identifying cases in communities. Under the TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP) has deployed AI-compatible handheld X-ray machines for community screening, expanded molecular testing to nearly 11,000 facilities, and provided nutritional support through the Ni-kshay Poshan Yojana and Ni-kshay Mitras.Under the TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, India is finding more people with TB than ever before.

Between December 2024 and March 2026, the campaign screened more than 28 crore vulnerable people and notified over 39 lakh TB patients, including nearly 13 lakh who had no symptoms.India has built one of the world’s largest molecular testing networks, with nearly 11,000 facilities, most of them using Truenat, a homegrown platform, alongside GeneXpert. According to the WHO’s 2025 report, around 60% of people with presumptive TB underwent a molecular test in 2024.

Community screening is now identifying lakhs of people with TB, many of them without symptoms. The next phase is to make molecular testing universal. This will require tests that work without sputum, handle much higher volumes, cost less at scale and reach the places where people are being identified.New diagnostic tools to expand testingThis year, the WHO issued its first-ever recommendations on three tools --- Near point-of-care (nPoC) molecular tests,Tongue swabs, and Sputum pooling --- aimed at addressing these needs.The nPoC are portable tests for primary health centres and community settings, at less than half the cost of many current molecular tests, while the tongue swabs involves a needle-free sample collection method for adults and adolescents who cannot produce sputum.

Sputum pooling is testing several people’s samples together on existing platforms such as Truenat and GeneXpert, reducing costs and machine time.At ICMR’s India Innovation Summit, 86 TB diagnostic innovations were showcased. An ICMR panel found that 10 were already approved and available for NTEP use, 15 more were recommended for fast-tracking, and 33 were at an earlier stage of development.Two kinds of tools are considered crucial.First, nPoC tests using tongue swabs can take testing closer to communities.

ICMR-validated tools such as Huwel Lifesciences’ UniAMP MTB use a tongue swab and give results in under 30 minutes on a portable device. Molbio’s Truelyse extends Truenat testing to oral swabs. Tools such as these can bring a confirmatory test to the same primary health centre (PHC) or screening camp where an AI-compatible X-ray identifies a person with presumptive TB.Second, open-system reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests can handle larger volumes.

Quantiplus MTB FAST is the first ICMR-validated open-system TB assay. It runs on RT-PCR machines already in public laboratories, many of them from India’s COVID-19-era testing network, and processes up to 96 samples in a single run at less than ₹200 per test. That is a fraction of the cost of current nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs), and the assay requires no new machines.According to the report, India recorded a 38% reduction in TB mortality since 2015, compared with a global decline of 35%, alongside a 94% treatment success rate among patients with drug-susceptible TB.The TB death rate also declined from 28 per lakh people in 2015 to 18 per lakh in 2025.“These achievements, highlighted in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report reflect India’s sustained progress towards eliminatin…