Heard on Morning Edition – “As long as you breathe, you are at risk anywhere in the world,” says physician Lucica Ditiu.
The risk she’s referring to is catching tuberculosis. While it may seem like a disease from the past, this airborne illness kills more people than any other infectious disease worldwide, roughly 1.2 million a year.
That number could increase dramatically because of the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign assistance, according to a new study co-authored by Ditiu.
As many as 10 million additional people could get TB, and 2.2 million could die by 2030 in high-burden countries under the worst-case funding scenario over the next five years, researchers report in the journal PLOS Global Public Health.
Even if funding is fully restored in a matter of months — a scenario that seems unlikely — the researchers estimate half a million more cases and nearly 100,000 more deaths by the end of the decade.
“The impact of these cuts will be concentrated in countries with the least capacity to reallocate funding to close the gap created by cuts to health aid,” says Nicolas Menzies, an associate professor of global health at Harvard University who wasn’t involved in the study.
“I think the methods are pretty solid,” he says of the findings, though with any effort to project out illness and death, they come with a hefty dose of uncertainty.
In particular, it’s hard to know precisely how much funding cuts translate to service disruptions, especially since countries will have varying responses to the cuts …
