Mortality is even more difficult to estimate than morbidity because the majority of high-burden countries does not record cause of death on standard death certificates which are a challenge to complete correctly even in countries that use them routinely. It is thus not that surprising that estimates of tuberculosis deaths have varied widely over the past 20 years. The initial estimates were apparently way too high, and this was in part due to erroneous allocation of death with HIV as its underying cause to tuberculosis, a correction that had been established by the year 2000.
