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The World Health Organization has revised up its estimate of how many people have tuberculosis by almost 500,000. In 2013 nine million people had developed TB around the world, up from 8.6 million in 2012, the WHO said. However, the number of people dying from TB continued to decline, it added. TB campaigners said that one of the biggest problems in tackling the deadly disease was gauging how many people were affected. Long-term decline About 1.5 million people had died in 2013 from TB, including 360,000 people who had been HIV positive, the WHO said in its Global Tuberculosis Report 2014. And in 2012, there had been 1.3 million tuberculosis deaths. The WHO said its report underlined that a "staggering number of lives are being lost to a curable disease and confirms that TB is the second biggest killer disease from a single infectious agent". One of the main factors in revising up the number of cases had been improved national data collection, the organisation added. In the long-term, the mortality rate from TB had fallen, dropping by 45% since 1990, the WHO said. Undiagnosed TB Since then, the number of people developing the disease had declined by about 1.5% per year. But about three million people with TB had remained undiagnosed in 2013, the WHO added. One of the biggest issues facing organisations tackling the disease was the number of undiagnosed cases, said tuberculosis charity TB Alert. "The fact that three million people are missing out on treatment every year explains why there are still so many avoidable deaths from tuberculosis," said TB Alert chief executive Mike Mandelbaum. "By strengthening health systems, especially in high-incidence countries, we can turn the tide of this global epidemic and finally move into sight of eradicating this disease," he added.