WHO estimates that 1·6 million people die each year before or during tuberculosis treatment. In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Kamila Romanowski and colleagues' meta-analysis showed that tuberculosis survivors have approximately three-times to four-times greater mortality than their local populations, including among younger adults. These transformative findings show that tuberculosis, already the most frequent cause of death from a single infectious agent, is associated with even greater mortality than current estimates. This excessive tuberculosis-associated mortality and the proposed pathways that might explain it are summarised in the figure...