LONDON – More than 8 million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis last year, the World Health Organization said Tuesday; This is the highest number recorded since the UN health agency started tracking.

The new report stated that approximately 1.25 million people died due to tuberculosis last year, and that tuberculosis has probably returned to being the world’s biggest infectious disease killer after being replaced by Covid-19 during the pandemic. Deaths are almost double the number of people killed by HIV in 2023.

WHO said tuberculosis continues to affect people mostly in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Western Pacific; India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Pakistan account for more than half of the world’s cases.

“The fact that tuberculosis still kills and sickens so many people is a great disgrace when we have the tools to prevent, detect and treat it,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

But tuberculosis deaths continue to fall worldwide and the number of newly infected people is starting to stabilize. The agency noted that less than half of the estimated 400,000 people with drug-resistant tuberculosis last year were diagnosed and treated.

Tuberculosis is caused by airborne bacteria that mostly affects the lungs. Roughly a quarter of the global population is estimated to have tuberculosis, but only 5-10% of them develop symptoms.

Advocacy groups including Médecins Sans Frontières have long called on US company Cepheid, which produces TB tests used in poor countries, to offer them for $5 per test to increase availability. Earlier this month, Médecins Sans Frontières and 150 global health partners sent an open letter to Cepheid, urging them to “put people’s lives first” and urgently help make tuberculosis testing more widely available worldwide.