The Trump administration's sweeping foreign aid cuts will send tuberculosis cases and deaths soaring around the world, humanitarian workers have warned.

One told AFP that people are already dying from a lack of treatment in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The United States has long been the biggest funder for the global fight against tuberculosis -- once known as consumption -- which is again the world's biggest infectious disease killer after being briefly surpassed by Covid-19.

But President Donald Trump froze US foreign aid after returning to the White House in January, abruptly halting the work of many US-funded programmes against tuberculosis and other health scourges such as HIV and malaria.

Trump's billionaire advisor Elon Musk has boasted of putting the vast US humanitarian agency USAID "through the woodchipper".

On Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of all USAID contracts were officially cancelled. It was unclear which programmes would be spared.

The World Health Organization warned last week that the cuts would endanger millions of lives, pointing out that tuberculosis (TB) efforts........

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