Modeled estimate. Estimated by a model from published research. Methodology last updated .
Modeled estimate of tuberculosis deaths attributable to the end of USAID funding for anti-TB programs, with the model, its assumptions and sources.
This represents the estimated number of deaths attributed to the termination of USAID funding for anti-tuberculosis programs.
Tuberculosis (TB, "white death," consumption) is an ancient bacterial disease that is spread through the air by people who have active TB in their lungs. Most infections are mild and produce no symptoms, but a small proportion of latent infections progress to active disease that, if left untreated, can be fatal. A latent infection is more likely to become active in those with weakened immune systems.
Symptoms of active TB are due to lung infection and typically include chronic cough with blood-containing mucus, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. Less commonly, infection of other organs can cause a wide range of symptoms.
Prevention of TB involves screening those at high risk, early detection and treatment of cases, and vaccination. Treatment requires the use of multiple antibiotics over a long period of time.
Source: Wikipedia:Tuberculosis
USAID support for anti-tuberculosis programs was suspended on January 24, 2025.
Mortality statistics for many countries receiving USAID lag by a year or more, so the number presented for the current death toll is estimated using a mathematical model.
The current estimate is derived from Mandal et al.'s deterministic compartmental model of TB transmission ("A deadly equation," PLOS Global Public Health, 2025), which projects the impact of U.S. Government funding cuts across 26 high-burden countries accounting for roughly 80% of the global TB burden. The model targets U.S. funding cuts specifically, so no additional cut fraction is applied here: U.S. support for TB programs ended entirely with USAID's dissolution.
The paper reports three scenarios for additional TB deaths from 2025 through 2030: 2,243,700 under a no-recovery (long-term reduction) scenario, 268,600 if funding recovers after one year, and 99,900 if funding recovers after three months. The latter two scenarios have been overtaken by events: USAID has been dissolved and TB funding has continued to fall. This model defaults to the no-recovery scenario.
Averaged over the six-year projection window, the no-recovery scenario implies approximately 374,000 attributable deaths per year. The model assumes deaths began accumulating at this constant rate on February 24, 2025 — one month after the documented January 24, 2025 suspension of USAID TB support, allowing for the disruption lag the Impact Counter project has documented — and continue at that rate thereafter.
The two lighter-recovery scenarios, along with the original Impact Counter-derived model, remain available as selectable alternatives in this counter's Model Explorer.
On average, this model attributes one TB death to the funding cut every 1.4 minutes.
Sources:
This counter previously used rates sampled from the Impact Counter project, whose trackers freeze, by design, at a one-year projection horizon. That original model has not been discarded: it remains available as a selectable alternative ("Impact Counter (2025)") in this counter's Model Explorer, where readers who prefer its rates can apply them and see the difference.
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Executive branch culpability for these deaths is not due to the lack of funding but to the abrupt termination of funding, which did not allow time for the aid effort to transition to other world aid agencies and NGOs. Regardless of whether other aid is now arriving, it could be, and that possibility reduces executive branch culpability over time, although the amount and schedule are debatable.
Culpability is modeled as attenuating over a four-year transition period from October 2025 through September 2029. Aid organizations have not offered a reliable schedule for the transition of TB aid, so this model makes the assumption that TB aid transition will follow the same four-year window over which the published PEPFAR transition plan schedules its handover. The TB model assumes culpability will follow an S-curve — slow at first while handover was barely possible, fastest in the middle years, tapering as an orderly transition nears completion.
This schedule reflects a judgment about how long a reasonable, orderly handover would have taken, not a measurement of the actual transition. Readers who weigh this differently can adjust it: the Model Explorer on this counter allows choosing other culpability schedules — including the staircase of the actual PEPFAR transition plan and this site's original two-year taper — as well as a maximum-culpability cap for those who attribute only a share of these deaths to executive branch policy.
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