There are two simple means of assessing the impact of today's global tuberculosis epidemic on individual nations. The first involves determining the total number of new cases per year for a given country, while the second involves calculating the fraction of the general population that this number represents. Both of these analyses were recently performed by the World Health Organization and are presented in the maps below.

This first map indicates the number of new tuberculosis cases recorded for each country of the world in 2010. The color assigned to each nation reflects the total number of new patients within its population:

The countries with the highest total numbers of new tuberculosis cases in 2010 were:

These five nations alone accounted for more than half of the 8,800,000 new patients reported worldwide for the year. Overall, 60% of this global total resided on the continent of Asia, while another 25% were in Africa. By comparison, the United States had 13,000 new cases of tuberculosis during 2010.

This second map illustrates the incidence rate of new tuberculosis cases for each country of the world in 2010. The color of each nation represents the number of new patients per 100,000 of its population:

Of the 23 countries in the world that had 300 or more new tuberculosis patients per 100,000 of population in 2010, 18 were located on the continent of Africa. The five nations with the highest incidence were:

By comparison, the United States had four new cases of tuberculosis per 100,000 of population in the same year, while on a global level there were 128 new cases of this disease for every 100,000 persons living on the planet.

This final map identifies the 22 countries of the world where more than 80% of all tuberculosis cases reside. It is in these so-called "high burden" nations that the Stop TB Partnership has been focusing the majority of its efforts to diagnose and treat patients. The countries are numbered within the map according to their burden ranking: