The world is on track to miss its health targets
Every year the World Health Organization publishes a global health statistics report. It features the numbers behind world health trends and, importantly, assesses whether we’re on track to reach ambitious goals set in 2015. It’s a bit like a health grade. The 2026 report was published on Wednesday. And the results aren’t looking brilliant. While we are seeing some improvements, they are uneven, and they’re far too slow. The targets themselves are part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a sprawling and ambitious plan focused on improving life around the world. The 17 goals were set to tackle poverty and climate change and to boost education, gender equality, health, and well-being, among many other quality of life issues. Those targets were meant to be met by 2030. Perhaps they were a little too ambitious. Here are the numbers and statistics that stood out to me on this year’s world health report card. 1.3 million new cases of HIV in 2024 Before the SDGs, there were the Millennium Development Goals. One MDG target was to halt and reverse the spread of HIV—and that target was exceeded by 2015. Back then, we were considered on track to “end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.” How depressing, then, to see that in 2024 there were an estimated 1.3 million new cases of HIV. That’s 40% lower than the figure from 2010. But it’s still 1.3 million additional people with HIV. The SDG target is to reduce HIV incidence by 90% by 2030—we’re not likely to meet it. 10.7 million new cases of TB The picture is even bleaker for tuberculosis, which ranks 10th on the WHO’s list of top global causes of death. The goal was to reduce cases by 80% between 2015 and 2030. So far, cases have only fallen by a measly 12%. And when you break the change down by region, the Americas saw an increase of 13% An 8.5% rise in malaria cases And then there’s malaria, the mosquito-borne disease with a 7% fatality rate. The European region has been free of malaria since 2015, but the disease is a significant concern in many countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa. The goal was to lower rates by 90% between 2015 and 2030. In 2024, there were an estimated 282 million cases of malaria globally—representing an 8.5% increase in incidence rates. Antimalarial drug resistance is a major challenge here—forms of the malaria virus that are resistant to drugs have been confirmed or suspected in eight countries in Africa, according to a separate WHO report. Mosquitoes that are resistant to commonly used insecticides are present in nine African countries. And climate change, which can alter mosquito habitats, may be making things worse. 42.8 million children are wasting We’re not meeting child health targets, either. Take malnutrition, for example. As of 2024, the global prevalence of wasting in children was 6.6%—that’s a staggering 42.8 million children who are literally wasting away because of a lack of adequate food. On the other end of the spectrum, 5.5% of children are now considered overweight. Both figures were meant to be below 5% by 2030, which now seems unlikely. Vaccination rates are dropping in the Americas Progress in improving childhood vaccination coverage has stalled. Globally, an estimated 76% of children are getting their second dose of a measles vaccine—a figure far below the the approximately 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. The Americas currently has lower rates of vaccine coverage for three of the four “core” vaccines than it did in 2015. This is partly due to a lack of investment, says Goodarz Danaei, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But now we have a misinformation campaign going around vaccines that makes it worse,” he adds. The covid-19 pandemic didn’t exactly help, either. The impact on health services led to millions of children missing out on routine vaccinations. 22.1 million pandemic-related deaths And of course the pandemic affected progress toward health goals in more direct ways: 7 million people died of covid-19. The WHO report estimates that, for each of these, there were an additional two “excess” deaths related to the pandemic, due to disruptions in health care, for example. That puts the total figure at 22.1 million pandemic-related deaths. A woman dies every two minutes from “maternal causes” Maternal mortality rates fell by about 40% between 2020 and 2023. But today’s rate equates to 712 maternal deaths every single day. That’s one every two minutes. The WHO report notes that we’d have to reduce the mortality rate by almost 15% per year in order to meet the 2030 target. This seems incredibly unlikely, particularly given the recent decimation of US funding for global aid programs, which is expected to result in thousands of additional maternal deaths. Progress has also slowed in reducing the risk of death from noninfectious diseases like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “Overall, neither the world nor any WHO region is currently on track to meet the 2030 SDG target,” the report states. 2.1 billion people struggle to afford health care Despite plans to make health care more affordable, a significant chunk of the population is being pushed into poverty by health-care costs. In 2022, 2.1 billion people faced financial hardship due to health spending—and 1.6 billion of them were living in or had been pushed into poverty. Across the board, there have been some important improvements in global health. But the achievements have not gone far enough. “The good news is that there is progress,” says Danaei. “But as always, the glass is half empty.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
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