Monitoring progress toward global health and development goals requires a basic understanding of levels, patterns, and trends in mortality. National health, population, and social services planning also depend on reliably measuring mortality rates. Yet current practice in estimating mortality levels in populations does not adequately capture the impact of recent public health crises, including the AIDS epidemic, war, and natural disasters. Mortality Estimation for National Populations provides a comprehensive methodological reassessment on how mortality is measured, resulting in new, unbiased, and comparable estimates of age-specific mortality rates, life expectancy by age, and other health indicators for 187 national populations. A novel feature of this work is the estimation of annual mortality rates from 1970 to 2011, providing important perspectives on the pace of mortality change in countries. To provide better age- and sex-specific measurements for all-cause mortality, this book thoroughly updates formal demographic methods including summary birth history, sibling survival, and death distribution methods.
Innovative statistical models such as spatial-temporal and Gaussian process regressions are used as data synthesizing tools. New demographic models to estimate mortality for neonatal age groups and new model life tables are developed and applied. Validation studies demonstrate that these new methods provide estimates with higher predictive validity than those based on conventional methods. Detailed case studies of the methods' application to Ethiopia, India, and Nicaragua are included. Christopher J.L. Murray is professor of global health and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Alan D. Lopez is head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland, Australia. Haidong Wang is assistant professor of global health at IHME.