BMC Public Health Research article The use of simplified verbal autopsy in identifying causes of adult death in a predominantly rural population in Ethiopia Kidest Lulu1 and Yemane Berhane*2 BioMed Central Open Access Address: 1Department of Community Health, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia and 2Department of Community Health, Faculty of Medicine, Addis Ababa University, P.o. Box 2077, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Email: Kidest Lulu - kidestlulu@yahoo.com; Yemane Berhane* - rhr.aau@ethionet.et * Corresponding author Published: 03 June 2005 BMC Public Health 2005, 5:58 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-5-58 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/5/58 Received: 15 September 2004 Accepted: 03 June 2005 © 2005 Lulu and Berhane; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Information on adult mortality is essentially non-existent in Ethiopia particularly from rural areas where access to health services is limited and most deaths occur at home. This study was conducted with the aim of identifying causes of adult death in a rural population of Ethiopia using a simplified verbal autopsy instrument. Methods: All deaths in the age-group 15–49 years during the period of 1995–99 were taken from computerized demographic surveillance database maintained by the Butajira Rural Health Program. Data on the causes of death were collected from close relatives of the deceased persons by lay interviewers. Causes of death were diagnosed using "expert algorithm" programmed onto a computer. Results: The major causes of death were acute febrile illnesses (25.2%), liver diseases (11.3%), diarrheal diseases (11.1%), tuberculosis (9.7%) and HIV/AIDS (7.4%). Overall communicable diseases accounted for 60.8% of the deaths. The high levels of mortality from communicable diseases reflect the poor socioeconomic development of the country, and the general poor coverage of health and education services in rural Ethiopia. The tools used in this study can easily be added-on to the numerous health surveys conducted in the country. Conclusion: The simplified approach to verbal autopsy diagnosis can produce useful data that can effectively guide priority health interventions in rural areas where routine information system is either very weak or non-existent. Background Mortality statistics have several advantages when com- pared to other sources of health information such as mor- bidity data as death is a unique event that is remembered for long time and because of its finality it is clearly defined. Thus, statistics on cause of death are reliable and useful in guiding priority interventions in public health [1]. In developing countries, where most deaths are neither attended by doctors nor medically certified, information on causes of death is usually incomplete and of poor qual- ity [2]. To alleviate the problem in resource poor countries an indirect method called verbal autopsy (VA), which makes use of lay reporters, has been adopted to identify causes of death. It uses information on the circumstances leading to death, symptoms and signs during the terminal Page 1 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)