Yet the results from the World Health Organisation also show major advances have been made in reducing TB infection and death rates.
Australia ranks as one of the countries least affected by the disease, but the Asia-Pacific region is a global hotspot.
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease of poverty but is still one of the biggest killers in the world.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it now equals HIV / AIDS as the most deadly infectious disease in the world.
Yet the WHO's 20th annual Global Tuberculosis Report also says major advances have been made in reducing the TB infection and death rates over the past two decades.
World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello says it is a very mixed result.
"Well it's good news and bad news. TB is a disease of poverty. The good news is, since the 1990s, we've reduced TB (deaths globally) by 47 per cent. The bad news, 1.5 million people died of it (last year), and a lot of them in our region: southeast Asia, PNG, western Pacific. So it's a mixed scorecard. We now really have to take seriously that this is a killer, as big as AIDS."
The WHO says better diagnosis and treatment have saved 43 million lives in the last 15 years but another 9.6 million people fell sick to the airborne disease in 2014.
China, India, Brazil and Russia have very high rates, and sub-Saharan Africa has the worst number of infections simultaneously with HIV / AIDS.
Almost three in five of the world's TB cases are on Australia's doorstep, in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific countries.
World Vision Australia operates a TB program throughout Papua New Guinea, where, just across the Torres Strait from Australia, it is at epidemic levels.
"PNG is off-target. It's poor. That means because TB is a disease of the poor, it's particularly got a problem. (About) 3,800 people died of TB in PNG last year. That concerns Australia because it's our nearest neighbour. It's only a very small strip of water between us, and we rightly need to be engaged here."
Australia has one of the lowest TB rates in the world, with about 1,300 infections and about a dozen deaths a year.
But the WHO warns there is little data on multi-drug resistant TB in the Western Pacific.
It was one of those strains from Papua New Guinea that crossed into Australia and killed two people in the last two years.
Tim Costello says billions of dollars more in funding is needed if TB is ever going to be controlled or eradicated.
"As a first-world disease (HIV/AIDS) had First World resources that we brought to it, and that benefited those in the developing world that were poor. They caught that wave of global concern about HIV. We haven't had that profile around TB."
The US$8 billion Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria was short US$1.4 billion this year.
Research for new drugs and vaccines is underfunded by US$1.3 billion.
Australia pledged AU$200 million to the Global Fund over its current three-year program.
The Australian chief executive of the global health lobby group Results, Maree Nutt, says the next three-year donor meeting for the Global Fund will be in 2016.
"We'd probably end TB at this rate in another 200 years. That's concerning. We need to be investing more to get this job done in 15 years. That's what the global goals are all about. For every dollar that's put into the Global Fund from Australia, more than $10 is invested in the Asia Pacific region from the Global Fund, so that's a really good return on investment and a good use of Australian aid dollars."
The WHO says the Global Fund has helped bring eight new anti-TB drugs and 15 vaccines to advanced stages of development but eradication is still a long way off.
Tim Costello, with World Vision Australia, says he hopes Australia will continue to pay its share.
"In the Pacific and southeast Asia, the Global Fund is doing far more than the Australian government ever could. In other words, we are leveraging our aid dollars massively. But, sadly, with cuts over the next four years of $11.3 billion to the Australian aid program, there's very little money there."
