:for a comprehensive list of potential causes, see list of causes of death by rate. for other uses, see cause of death (disambiguation). in law, medicine, and statistics, the cause of death is the condition or conditions officially determined to have resulted in a human's death. in modern times, such a determination usually is essential data on a governmental death certificate. ==international definition of 'cause of death'== in 1967, the twentieth world health assembly defined the causes of death to be entered on the medical certificate of cause of death as âall those diseases, morbid conditions or injuries which either resulted in or contributed to death and the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced any such injuriesâ. the purpose of the definition is to ensure that all the relevant information is recorded and that the certifier does not select some conditions for entry and reject others. the definition does not include symptoms and modes of dying, such as heart failure or respiratory failure (international classification of diseases - who). ===underlying cause of death=== it was agreed by the sixth decennial international revision conference 1948 that the cause of death for primary tabulation should be designated the underlying cause of death. from the standpoint of prevention of death, it is necessary to break the chain of events or to effect a cure at some point. the most effective public health objective is to prevent the precipitating cause from operating. for this purpose, the underlying cause has been defined as â(a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death, or (b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injuryâ. ==current state of collection of causes of death== mortality statistics are one of the principal sources of health information and in many countries they are the most reliable type of health data. civil registration and vital statistics systems are the foundation of modern public administration. when properly functioning, such systems are the most reliable source of continuous data on fertility, mortality and causes of death. causes of death and cause-specific mortality statistics derived from such systems are instrumental in guiding national and global policies and priorities for health development. only around a quarter of the global population lives in countries where more than 90% of births and deaths are registered â and these are mostly high-income countries. in low- and lower-middle-income countries, only a small proportion of deaths are counted by the system. in recent decades, little progress has been made with only few exceptions â in south africa, for example, successful efforts were made to increase the coverage of birth and death registrations from about 50% in the mid- 1990s to almost 90% by 2008. the two most populous co
Causes_of_death Epidemiology Genealogy Legal_terms Medical_terminology Statistical_terminology Vital_statistics