President Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid funding through USAID, and then the shut down of the organization itself, means an immediate halt to funding for global TB programs to diagnose, treat and prevent the disease (worth $406 million in 2024), and if not somehow reversed or this funding replaced before it’s too late, will increase the risk of TB and of drug-resistant TB worldwide, inevitably affecting rates in the United States over time. But the impact of a freeze or cuts to foreign aid also means a freeze on global HIV prevention programs, and this puts everyone, again including Americans, at risk of a major explosion of not just HIV but also antibiotic-resistant TB. Put together, we may be deliberately engineering a global catastrophe that could eventually return us to those bad old pre-antibiotic days of early deaths from TB among all classes.
Read the full story at Salon.
For more TB updates, check out the TB CAB Weekly Newsletter (Issue #7, 23 February 2025).
The newsletter is brought to you by the Global TB Community Advisory Board (TB CAB) with the support of Treatment Action Group (TAG) and EATG. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
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