News Release

Determining cause of death in developing countries

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Two articles on mortality are published in next week’s PLoS Medicine. In the first, Christopher Murray and colleagues achieved encouraging results from their use of vital registration data in Mexico with a new method to estimate population cause-specific mortality fractions. In the second article, Murray and colleagues propose and -- using data from China -- validate a new strategy for analyzing verbal autopsy data that combines the advantages of previous methods. A related perspective by Peter Byass (who was not involved in these two studies) discusses how these studies report important methodological advances in determining cause of death and why this is crucial for health planning and prioritization.

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Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R (2007) Estimating population cause-specific mortality fractions from in hospital mortality: Validation of a new method. PLoS Med 4(11): e326.

IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040326

PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-murray-1.pdf

Citation: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G (2007) Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data. PLoS Med 4(11): e 327.

IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040327

PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-murray-2.pdf

CONTACT:

Christopher Murray
University of Washington
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
1616 Eastlake Ave E
Suite 300
Seattle, WA 98102
United States of America
+1 206-770-1586
cjlm@u.washington.edu

Related PLoS Medicine Perspective:

Citation: Byass P (2007) Who needs cause-of-death data? PLoS Med 4(11): e333.

IN YOUR ARTICLE, PLEASE LINK TO THIS URL, WHICH WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE PUBLISHED PAPER: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040333 PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.plos.org/press/plme-04-11-byass.pdf

CONTACT:

Peter Byass
Umeå University
Epidemiology & Public Health Sciences
Umeå University
Umeå, 90185
Sweden
+46 90 785 33 45
peter.byass@epiph.umu.se

About PLoS Medicine

PLoS Medicine is an open access, freely available international medical journal. It publishes original research that enhances our understanding of human health and disease, together with commentary and analysis of important global health issues. For more information, visit http://www.plosmedicine.org

About the Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. For more information, visit http://www.plos.org

Everything published by PLoS Medicine is Open Access: freely available for anyone to read, download, redistribute and otherwise use, as long as the authorship is properly attributed.


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