A review of the quality of cause of death data from 115 WHO member countries, published in 2005, categorized South Africa as having low quality cause of death data based on a combination of a more than 20% of deaths being ill-defined deaths and less than 70% of deaths being registered.
Furthermore, extensive miss-classification of HIV/AIDS as an underlying cause,2,3 made it necessary for the Initial South African National Burden of Disease Study to use a modelling approach to estimate the extent of HIV/AIDS mortality. In addition, the lack of information regarding causes of injury deaths, made it necessary to use the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System to estimate the injury mortality cause profile for the National Burden of Disease Study