More countries are keeping track of why people die.
According to the World Health Organization, the cause of almost half of all deaths globally are now recorded.
Of the 56 million deaths worldwide in 2015, 27 million were recorded with the cause of death. That’s up from only one-third recorded causes of deaths in 2005.
Dr. Gretchen Stevens talked about why such data is important, “So the impact is that in the areas where mortality rates are the highest we have the most uncertainty about what people are dying from and this has major implications, so for example one of the leading causes of death for children under five is pneumonia, and there is quite a bit of uncertainty about which bugs are actually killing the children, if there were sufficient medical infrastructure in place to do diagnoses and record this information then we wouldn’t have so much uncertainty and we’d have much easier time targeting our interventions.”