Efforts to improve child survival can be effective only if they are based on reasonably accurate information about the causes of childhood deaths. Cause-of-death information is needed to prioritize interventions and plan for their delivery, to determine the effectiveness of disease-specific interventions, and to assess trends in disease burden in relation to national and international goals.

Number of deaths due to a specific cause, among children aged < 5 years, per 1 000 live births. The causes of death refers to the concept of the 'underlying cause of death' as defined by ICD-10 (WHO, 1992).

Age, Cause

Data from civil registration with complete coverage (80% or over) and medical certification of cause of death, or nationally representative epidemiological studies of causes of child death (special studies analysing causes of death based on verbal autopsy studies or other sources for countries without civil registration data).  

Impact

Estimates of child causes of death were prepared by WHO and the Maternal Child Epidemiology Estimation group (MCEE).   The number of live births are obtained from the World Population Prospects produced by the United Nations Population Division. The latest revision that were available at the time of estimation was used.   WHO regularly receives mortality-by-cause data from Member States, as recorded in national civil registration systems. These statistics are evaluated for their completeness and quality. Complete and nationally-representative data were then grouped by ICD codes into the cause categories, and the proportions of these causes with regard to the total number of deaths of children aged less than 5 years were then computed.   For low mortality countries without adequate vital registration data, the cause distribution was estimated using a multinomial model applied to death registration data. For high mortality countries without adequate vital registration data, the cause distribution was estimated using a multinomial model applied to (largely) verbal autopsy (VA) data from research studies. Cause-specific under-five mortality estimates from the WHO technical programmes and UNAIDS were taken into account in assigning the distribution of deaths to specific causes. A variety of methods were used by MCEE and WHO to develop country- and regional-level cause-specific mortality estimates.   For more details on MCEE/WHO methodology to estimate child causes of death, country level, 2000-2010, please refer to the WHO Global Health Estimates.     Predominant type of statistics: predicted and adjusted.  

Aggregation of estimates for WHO Member States

N/A

Annual

Annual

A better understanding of the indirect contributions of diseases to child deaths is needed in order to assess disease control priorities and evaluate interventions.