%0 Journal Article
%T Verbal autopsy and global mortality statistics: if not now, then when?
%A Philip W Setel
%J Population Health Metrics
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1478-7954-9-20
%X In 2000, the state of knowledge on verbal autopsy (VA, a term that covers the design and application of postmortem caregiver interviews, procedures for assigning one or more probable causes of death, and the aggregation and tabulation of population-level mortality statistics based on this data source) centered on a small group of demographers and epidemiologists, many of whom ran intervention trials in various demographic surveillance sites. Almost the entire community of scholarship was on a first-name basis; we could easily gather in a medium-sized conference room, and any of our students or colleagues could become an expert on the VA literature with a week or two of focused reading. Throughout this period, those who remained dedicated to maximizing the potential of VA made steady progress. Yet throughout, a deep and sometimes reflexive scepticism remained that VA could ever really deliver the goods as a reliable measurement tool. The persistent shortcomings in cause of death data, and reluctance to widely embrace VA outside of demographic surveillance sites, have forced the global health community to make do with sources of limited coverage and dubious quality and consistency, applying increasingly complex statistical analyses to "correct" for all manner of bias and nonsampling error.The papers in this issue of Population Health Metrics go far in addressing central questions about how much VA can contribute to our measurement of health and health impact. How close to truth can VA ever get? How good is "good enough" for decision-making? Is our putative "gold standard" of medically certified deaths all that robust to begin with - in industrialized or lower-income countries? Can we make the production of VA data better, faster, and cheaper? What alternatives to demographic surveillance systems exist to permit the collection of mortality data from large, representative population samples? Can VA detect disease outbreaks, the population effects of antiretroviral thera
%U http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/9/1/20