ABSTRACT
All aspects of population health decision-making – policy development, programme planning, monitoring and evaluation – should ideally be guided by accurate, pertinent and up-to-date empirical data. Verbal autopsy is an indirect approach to determining the probable biomedical causes of a death through interviewing the person who best knew about the health and wellbeing of the deceased person and the events leading to the person's death. Another approach to obtaining mortality data used in a number of developing countries is the establishment of designated demographic surveillance sites (DSS). The Demographic and Health Surveys project of the US Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization's World Health Survey (WHS) are useful attempts to produce more comparable international morbidity data. In recent years the WHO has been joined by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle as a key producer of comprehensive global, regional and country-level health estimates.
