Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly – Daily update: 21 May 2026

Delegates at the seventy-ninth World Health Assembly in Geneva on Thursday endorsed a landmark decision to develop a post-2030 tuberculosis strategy, calling for the Director-General to consult Member States and key stakeholders before submitting the proposal to the Eighty-first World Health Assembly in 2028. The move aims to align global tuberculosis control efforts with emerging scientific advances and current epidemiological trends, while ensuring strong integration with primary healthcare systems, universal health coverage initiatives, and global health security frameworks. The strategy is also expected to feed directly into the 2028 United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB, providing a forward-looking roadmap after the current End TB Strategy concludes. The announcement follows a comprehensive review of progress and challenges in implementing the existing strategy, which has saved an estimated 83 million lives through expanded treatment between 2000 and 2024. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, global TB incidence declined in 2024 and access to essential TB services reached record levels. However, delegates cautioned that TB remains the world’s leading infectious killer, with sustainable development targets off track due to persistent funding gaps, pandemic disruptions, deepening inequalities, ongoing conflicts, and climate-induced displacement.

In a parallel development, the Assembly adopted a landmark resolution recognizing steatotic liver disease (SLD)—formerly known as fatty liver disease—as a rapidly growing contributor to the global burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). With an estimated 1.7 billion people affected worldwide, SLD is now one of the fastest-growing causes of chronic liver disease globally. The resolution underscores its close links to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic conditions, while also noting the continuing impact of alcohol-related liver damage. Without effective prevention and care, SLD can progress to severe complications including liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer, placing growing pressure on health systems across all income levels. The resolution urges Member States to integrate SLD into national NCD strategies, strengthen primary healthcare responses, enhance surveillance and public awareness, and promote coordinated, multisectoral action targeting shared risk factors such as unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and harmful alcohol use. Priority attention is recommended for high-risk groups, including children and adolescents.

The resolution further calls for improved access to prevention, screening, diagnosis, and management services, particularly for vulnerable populations. It also requests the World Health Organization to embed SLD within ongoing NCD prevention and control efforts, provide technical support to countries upon request, deepen collaboration with key partners, and report biennially on progress as part of the broader global NCD agenda. This integrated approach aligns with the Political Declaration of the UN General Assembly’s fourth high-level meeting on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases and the promotion of mental health and well-being, adopted last year. Delegates emphasized that addressing SLD within the broader NCD framework is essential to reducing preventable liver disease deaths and achieving universal health coverage by 2030. The Assembly’s twin decisions reflect a renewed commitment to tackling both infectious and noncommunicable threats through coordinated, evidence-based, and equitable health policies.