CUTS to most of the US foreign humanitarian aid budget could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, medical journal the Lancet reported today.

New research by the Lancet found that a third of those at risk of premature deaths are children.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that President Donald Trump’s administration had cancelled more than 80 per cent of the Agency for International Development’s (USAid) programmes.

Davide Rasella, who co-authored the Lancet report, said: “For many low and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.”

Mr Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, said the funding cuts “risk abruptly halting and even reversing two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations.”

Publication of the report comes as dozens of world leaders meet in the Spanish city of Seville for a United Nations-led conference aimed at tackling the widening gap between the richest and poorest nations.

The US, previously by far the largest aid provider, has refused to attend the conference and has already distanced itself from a draft deal.

Looking back over data from 133 nations, the team of researchers estimated that USAid funding had prevented around 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

The researchers also modelled how the slashing of funding by 83 per cent by the US could impact on death rates.

The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by the end of 2030, the projections found. That number includes over 4.5 million children under the age of five, equating to around 700,000 child deaths a year.

After returning to power in January, Mr Trump called on billionaire Elon Musk to lead efforts to slash the federal budget.

The president has repeatedly accused USAid of supporting left wing projects, although its critics have long accused it of the opposite, including funnelling money to groups undermining the US’s adversaries.

Last month, a UN source warned that hundreds of thousands of people were “slowly starving” in Kenyan refugee camps after the slashing of US funding reduced food rations to their lowest ever levels.

The BBC reported this week that a baby at a hospital in Kakuma, north west Kenya, was showing signs of malnutrition and had parts of her skin peeling away.