Causes of death: an assessment of global patterns of mortality around 1985

Cause-of-death statistics are available for virtually the entire population of the developed world (1.17 billion in 1985) and thus estimates of the mortality pattern in these countries can be made with some confidence, notwithstanding the artefacts which arise due to differences in diagnostic and certification practices between countries. In the developing countries, cause-of-death estimation is much more difficult due to the paucity of mortality statistics. Nonetheless, there are several sources of information on mortality, ranging from surveillance systems and small-scale community studies to complete vital registration, which can be exploited to estimate mortality patterns. Of the 50 million deaths which occur throughout the world each year, roughly 39 million (78%) occur in developing countries. For the developing countries as a whole, infectious and parasitic diseases are estimated to have accounted for almost one-half of all deaths in 1985. Diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory diseases (primarily pneumonia) and tuberculosis each claimed about 3-5 million deaths in the developing world in the mid-1980s, with a further 2.6 million due to measles and whooping cough. Perinatal conditions are estimated to have been responsible for a little over 3.2 million deaths in 1985 in developing countries, one-quarter of which were due to neonatal tetanus alone. Maternal causes claimed the lives of about 0.5 million women. At the same time, the chronic diseases are emerging as a leading cause of death in several regions of the developing world, particularly Latin America and East Asia. Circulatory and specific degenerative diseases are estimated to have caused about 6.5 million deaths in 1985. Chronic lung diseases and cancer are each thought to have claimed about 2.5 million lives in 1985. External causes also probably accounted for 2.0-2.5 million deaths.