ABSTRACT
The field of public health has developed a set of numbers to describe and summarize the health of a population. These quantitative estimates are similar to those used by physicians to summarize our individual health status, such as weight, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and temperature. This chapter will describe the most commonly used population-based health status measures, including death (mortality) rates, sickness (morbidity) rates, and life expectancy rates. A rate includes a denominator that defines the context of the number. Simply reporting the total number of people who died in one year does not provide nearly as much useful information as specifying the number of deaths for a certain defined group of people, which may be 1000, 10,000, or 100,000, depending on the measure that is being utilized.
