The World Health Organization said Tuesday that more than 8 million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis last year, the highest number recorded since the U.N. health agency began keeping track.

Nearly 1.25 million people died from TB last year, the new report said, adding that TB is likely to become the world’s top infectious disease after being replaced by Covid-19 during the pandemic. These deaths are almost double the number of people who will die from HIV in 2023.

WHO said TB is most affecting people in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Western Pacific; More than half of the world’s cases are in India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines and Pakistan.

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

However, TB deaths continue to decline globally and the number of new people becoming infected is beginning to stabilise. Last year, an estimated 400,000 people were estimated to have drug-resistant TB, less than half of whom were diagnosed and treated, the agency said.

Tuberculosis is caused by airborne bacteria that mostly affects the lungs. It is estimated that about one-quarter of the global population has TB, but only 5–10% of them develop symptoms.

Advocacy groups including Doctors Without Borders have long called on Cepheid, the US company that produces TB tests used in poor countries, to make them available for $5 per test to increase availability. Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders and 150 global health partners sent an open letter to Cepheid calling on it to “put people’s lives first” and urgently help make TB testing more widespread globally.