Editorial
Verbal autopsy: advancing science, facilitating application
-
* Corresponding author: Christopher JL Murray cjlm@u.washington.edu
1 Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, 2301 Fifth Ave, Suite 600, Seattle, WA 98121, USA
2 University of Queensland, School of Population Health, 288 Herston Road, Herston, Queensland 4006, Australia
3 Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
Population Health Metrics 2011, 9:18 doi:10.1186/1478-7954-9-18
Published: 27 July 2011First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
Critical information on population health is needed to inform planning, resource allocation, program implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. One of the key descriptors of a population's health is information about causes of death. Since many countries lack complete vital registration systems with medical certification of deaths, cause of death information is often missing. Verbal autopsy (VA) can be used to determine individuals' causes of death and cause-specific mortality fractions in populations without a complete vital registration system. A standard VA instrument paired with easy-to-implement and reliable analytic methods could help bridge significant gaps in information about causes of death, particularly in resource-poor settings.