Verbal autopsy standards: ascertaining and attributing causes of death

The purpose of this manual is to disseminate new standard data collection and cause-of-death assignment resources for verbal autopsy, and to provide some general guidelines for their use. These resources include:

• Verbal autopsy questionnaires for three age groups (under four weeks; four weeks to 14 years; and 15 years and above) (Part 2);
• Cause-of-death certification and coding guidelines for applying the International statistical classification of diseases and related health problems, tenth revision (ICD-10) [1] to verbal autopsy (Part 3, sections 3.2–3.8); and
• A cause-of-death list for verbal autopsy with corresponding ICD-10 codes (“correspondence table”, Part 3, section 3.9).