Approximately 50 to 60 countries report to WHO regularly. For a number of less developed countries there are intermittent data sets, but some of these are also of limited usefulness. For other less developed countries, notably in Latin America, there are series that are of substantially improved quality in recent years. Outside of Latin America, a very few less developed countries present robust time series. Mortality data is comprised of the number of deaths by age group, cause of death, sex, year, and country or area.
Age group is reported in one of nine different age groupings.
Country or area is a four digit code representing the reporting unit. Mortality data includes several ancillary translation tables including ICD codes, WHO region, and country or area reporting unit. The data store also contains supplementary population data which is used to calculate mortality rates and other statistics. The attention of the potential user is also drawn to the fact that selected presentations from the data base are published in hard copy annually in the World Health Statistics Annual that can be found in most large public, and university libraries. The data base is now about a gigabyte in size.