Who Needs Cause-of-Death Data?

From:: Department for International Development
Published: 1 January 2007

Country:: China, Mexico
Document Type:: Journal Article
Theme:: Health
Authors:: Byass, P.

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.

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