Countries With the Most Tuberculosis Cases in Children 2024

What this chart shows. The 25 countries with the most new tuberculosis cases in children aged 0 to 14 in 2024. India had 289,000, Indonesia 179,000 and Pakistan 92,000, out of 1.19 million children worldwide, 11.1% of all cases.

How the data is collected. Tuberculosis is harder to confirm in children than in adults, because young children rarely cough up the sputum used for testing, so many are diagnosed on symptoms and X-rays or not at all. WHO therefore models the number of children who fall ill from adult cases, household contact patterns and the age structure of each country, rather than relying on notifications.

Background. The share of cases that are children varies widely. In Papua New Guinea children make up 27.1% of all cases and in Cambodia 22.9%, against 10.7% in India. China, with 696,000 cases in total, had only 8,000 in children, 1.1%, the lowest share among these countries.

Limits. Child estimates carry more uncertainty than adult ones; India's ranges from 217,000 to 361,000. The dataset has no country breakdown of child cases for 2015, so this chart cannot show a trend. Several countries are tied after rounding, including Tanzania and Angola at 21,000.