The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) annual health statistics report paints a sobering picture.
Too many people are dying of preventable causes, while hard-fought gains are losing steam or even reversing, said Yukiko Nakatani, MD, PhD, the WHO’s assistant director‑general for health systems, access and data.
The drivers of these failures are multifaceted. During a news conference yesterday, Nakatani cited persistent inequities and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the worsening health financing crisis: The United States and other wealthy countries are contributing less to international aid, which has disrupted medical services and weakened disease surveillance.
“Progress is too slow, too uneven, and increasingly fragile,” she said.
Infectious disease burden
The report was a mixed bag for the world’s three most deadly communicable diseases, which, combined, caused an estimated 2.47 million deaths in 2024.
Malaria rates were most concerning, as cases have increased by 8.5% since 2015.
However, from 2010 through 2024, there was a 40% reduction in new HIV cases, though the report notes this rate is insufficient to reach the target of 370,000 or fewer new infections by 2025.
Likewise, the tuberculosis (TB) incidence rate dropped 12% from 2015 through 2024. However, the decline falls short of the progress needed to meet the WHO End TB Strategy’s goal of reducing cases by 80% by 2030.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa bear the greatest burden of new cases of these three diseases. This is also true for new cases of viral hepatitis B and C, which are responsible for 95% of the world’s hepatitis-related deaths.
The good news is that rates of new hep B infections fell from 1.3 million in 2015 to 0.9 million in 2024. Gains were more modest for hep C, dropping from 1 million to 0.9 million during that same period.
These declines in hepatitis cases are largely driven by expanded birth-dose and infant vaccination coverage over the past 20 years. Progress, however, is too slow to meet the 2030 targets of reducing hepatitis-related deaths by 65% compared with 2015 levels.
The report also finds that coverage of routine childhood immunizations, including measles and pertussis (whooping cough), has largely stalled or remains too slow to close coverage gaps.
Impact on women, children, underserved
Women, children, and people from underserved communities continue to bear a disproportionate risk due to conditions that undermine their health and well-being.
For example, the report found that one in four women are harmed by intimate partner violence, and anemia affects 30.7% of women of reproductive age, with no improvement over the past decade.
The number of children whose growth and development are hindered by poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation has fallen from 180.4 million kids in 2012 to 150.2 million in 2024—a net reduction of 17%.
However, as with infectious diseases, the report noted that the decrease is insufficient to achieve the 2030 targets, which were to reduce the number of children affected by stunting by 40% from the 2012 baseline.
The percentage of people experiencing financial hardship due to out-of-pocket health spending changed little, declining from 28% in 2015 to 26% in 2022. The report finds that in 2022, 1.6 billion people were living in poverty or pushed into poverty by out-of-pocket health expenses.
While progress on universal health coverage was already slowing prior to COVID-19, the pandemic “further disrupted services and exposed underlying weaknesses in health systems and financing,” the WHO said.