The World Health Statistics 2026 report, published by the World Health Organization on 13 May, carries a paradox on almost every page. The gains it documents are genuine. A 40 percent reduction in new HIV infections between 2010 and 2024. A 36 percent drop in the number of people requiring interventions for neglected tropical diseases over the same period. The WHO’s African Region achieved faster reductions in new HIV infections than the global average — down 70 percent since 2010 compared with 40 percent globally — and also outpaced the global rate on tuberculosis. These are not small movements. They represent millions of lives in different conditions than they would otherwise have been.
The report also states that the world is “off track to achieve any of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030,” that progress in many areas has slowed, and that in some it has reversed. The HIV and NTD figures are cited as among the bright points. But the infrastructure that produced them, the funding systems, the programmes, and the health systems they flow through, is now under significant and specific pressure.
What the HIV figure represents
A 40 percent reduction in new infections across fourteen years is a result of sustained investment in prevention, testing, antiretroviral treatment access, and targeted behavioural programmes. No single intervention produced it. The figure reflects the cumulative effect of programmes that operated at scale, consistently, over a long period.
The United States has historically been the largest single contributor to international HIV funding, providing around 73 percent of all donor funding for HIV programmes in low- and middle-income countries in 2023, primarily through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. Early in 2025, USAID grant holders were instructed to stop work. Testing counsellors and clinic staff were laid off in the same period. Studies from Mozambique and South Africa documented immediate drops in HIV testing and new treatment initiations in the first quarter of 2025. Modelling work published by UNAIDS in 2025 projected that if US-supported programmes were halted without equivalent replacement, there could be more than 6 million additional new HIV infections by 2030 — potentially returning infection levels to those not seen since the early 2000s.
Neglected tropical diseases and what the 36% figure includes
Neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, are a group of conditions, including lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, and several others, that predominantly affect people living in poverty in tropical and subtropical regions. The 36 percent reduction in the number of people requiring interventions between 2010 and 2024 reflects a combination of mass drug administration programmes, improved sanitation, and sustained public health campaigns that, like the HIV work, required consistent funding and logistical infrastructure over many years.
The gains in this area are concentrated in specific regions and specific diseases. They are not uniformly distributed. And because NTD programmes depend on donated medicines, coordinated delivery, and community health infrastructure that is itself dependent on external funding, they are vulnerable to the same financing pressures that now affect HIV programmes.
Where the broader picture is worse
The HIV and NTD improvements are among the few areas where the World Health Statistics 2026 report can present an unambiguously positive trajectory. Much of the rest of the data is more difficult.
Progress toward universal health coverage has slowed sharply. The WHO’s service coverage index rose only from 68 to 71 between 2015 and 2023. One quarter of the global population faced financial hardship from health costs. Around 1.6 billion people were living in or pushed into poverty from out-of-pocket health spending in 2022. Malaria incidence increased by 8.5 percent since 2015. Anaemia affects 30.7 percent of women of reproductive age, with no improvement over the past decade. Childhood vaccination coverage remains below target.
The COVID-19 pandemic’s shadow runs through the report. Between 2020 and 2023, it is linked to an estimated 22.1 million excess deaths, including indirect deaths. That figure is more than three times the number of officially reported COVID-19 deaths. The WHO states that this reversed a decade of gains in life expectancy, and that recovery remains incomplete and uneven.
The data gap underneath all of this
There is a further problem the report names directly. As of the end of 2025, only 18 percent of countries were reporting mortality data to WHO within one year. Nearly one third have never reported cause-of-death data. Of the estimated 61 million deaths globally in 2023, only around one third were reported with cause-of-death information, and roughly one fifth had usable coded data.
This matters for how to read all the figures above, including the gains. The 40 percent reduction in HIV infections and the 36 percent drop in NTD burden are derived from the best available data. Where data collection is poor, those estimates carry more uncertainty. The WHO notes this not to undercut its own figures but because the data gap affects the ability to monitor whether progress is holding, slipping, or reversing in real time. Progress built on incomplete reporting is harder to protect.
What the WHO is asking for
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, said in the report’s accompanying statement that “investing in stronger, more equitable health systems, including resilient health data systems is essential to target action, close gaps and ensure accountability.” Dr Yukiko Nakatani, the WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Systems, named “a worsening health financing crisis” as one of the conditions requiring urgent response, alongside rising environmental risks and ongoing health emergencies.
The language is institutional and measured. The situation it describes is not. A decade of measurable progress in two of the most intractable areas of global health is now contingent on decisions about funding that are being made in contexts entirely external to the public health systems that produced the gains. The WHO’s report is, among other things, a record of what was built and a description of how fragile the conditions for maintaining it have become.
