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The World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, that the curtailment of U.S. financial backing poses a dire threat to initiatives aimed at suppressing tuberculosis, casting a perilous uncertainty over the survival of millions—a pronouncement steeped in urgency amid shifting global health priorities.
Over the past two decades, concerted international campaigns against tuberculosis—recognized as the most fatal infectious malady worldwide—have safeguarded upwards of 79 million individuals, staving off approximately 3.65 million deaths in 2024 alone, according to the authoritative metrics of the United Nations health body.
However, the WHO emphasized that the sudden truncation of U.S. aid disbursements, enacted across a broad swath of foreign allocations since President Donald Trump’s reinauguration in January 2025, now endangers these painstakingly achieved milestones, imperiling vast populations—most acutely those in precarious circumstances—with a resurgence of preventable mortality.
This admonition emerged in parallel with a significant judicial rebuff on the same day, as the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Trump’s attempt to immobilize roughly $2 billion in overseas assistance, a ruling that momentarily arrested the administration’s fiscal recalibration.
On January 20, Trump had affixed his signature to an executive mandate instituting a 90-day suspension of all American international aid commitments, a calculated pause intended to facilitate a meticulous reassessment of the nation’s extraterritorial expenditures—a policy now eliciting profound repercussion.
And he has essentially dismantled USAID, the primary organisation for distributing US humanitarian aid.
WHO said data it had received from the US government, national TB programmes and other sources showed Washington had been providing approximately a quarter of total international donor funding for TB — around $200 million to 250 million annually.
“The 2025 funding cuts will have a devastating impact on TB programmes,” WHO warned, highlighting the situation in low- and middle-income countries that rely heavily on international aid.
The World Health Organization (WHO) disclosed on Wednesday, March 5, 2025, that the retraction of U.S. financial support imperils tuberculosis management in 18 of the most afflicted nations, which had anticipated that 89 percent of their TB care resources would emanate from American contributions—a vulnerability now starkly exposed.
The United Nations health authority identified the African continent as bearing the brunt of these fiscal dislocations, with the South-East Asian and Western Pacific zones trailing closely in the magnitude of disruption—an ominous gradient of impact across critical regions.
Read also: WHO Withdrawal: African Union Voices Disappointment Over US Move
Tereza Kasaeva, director of WHO’s global tuberculosis initiative, asserted in the organization’s communique that any interruption—be it monetary, governmental, or logistical—to TB interventions harbors the potential to unleash catastrophic and frequently lethal repercussions for countless individuals worldwide, a sobering testament to the fragility of these life-preserving efforts.
