Who Needs Cause-of-Death Data?

Abstract

This Perspective discusses the following new studies published in PLoS Medicine: (1) Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R (2007) Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in-hospital mortality: Validation of a new method. PLoS Med 4(11): e326, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040326. Working in Mexico and using vital registration data, Chris Murray and colleagues achieved encouraging results with a new method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions; (2) Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G (2007) Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data. PLoS Med 4(11): e 327, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040327. Chris Murray and colleagues propose and, using data from China, validate a new strategy for analyzing verbal autopsy data that combines the advantages of previous methods.

Citation

PLOS Medicine, 4(11), 1715-1716

Who Needs Cause-of-Death Data?

Updates to this page

Published 1 January 2007