It is important to know why people die to improve how people live.
Measuring how many people die each year helps to assess the
effectiveness of our health systems and direct resources to where they
are needed most. For example, mortality data can help focus activities
and resource allocation in the health sector, as well as in other
sectors such as transportation, food and agriculture, and the
environment.
COVID-19 has highlighted the importance for
countries investing in civil registration and vital statistics systems
to allow daily counting of deaths and direct prevention and treatment
efforts. It has also revealed inherent fragmentation in data collection
systems in most low-income countries, where policy-makers still do not
know with confidence how many people die and of what causes.
The
World Health Organization develops standards and best practices for
data collection, processing and synthesis through the consolidated and
improved International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
This digital platform facilitates reporting of timely and accurate data
for causes of death for countries to routinely generate and use health
information that conforms to international standards.
The routine collection and analysis of high-quality data on deaths and causes of death, as well as data on disability– disaggregated by age, sex and geographic location – is essential for improving health and reducing deaths and disability across the world.
Editor’s note
WHO’s Global Health Estimates, from which the information in this fact sheet is extracted, present comprehensive and comparable health-related data, including life expectancy, healthy life expectancy, mortality and morbidity, and burden of diseases at global, regional and country levels disaggregated by age, sex and cause. The estimates released in 2024 report on trends for more than 160 diseases and injuries annually from 2000 to 2021.
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