Estimating causes of community death of adults in Myanmar from a nationwide population sample: Application of verbal autopsy.

In Myanmar 84% of deaths occur in the community, of which half are unregistered and none have a reliable cause of death (COD) recorded. Since 2018, Myanmar has introduced improved registration practices and verbal autopsy (VA) to assess whether such methods can produce policy relevant information on community COD. Community health midwives and public health supervisors grade II collected VAs on over 80,000 deaths which occurred between January 2018 and December 2019 in a nationwide sample of 42 townships in Myanmar.

Monitoring progress with national and subnational health goals by integrating verbal autopsy and medically certified cause of death data.

Introduction: The measurement of progress towards many Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and other health goals requires accurate and timely all-cause and cause of death (COD) data. However, existing guidance to countries to calculate these indicators is inadequate for populations with incomplete death registration and poor-quality COD data. We introduce a replicable method to estimate national and subnational cause-specific mortality rates (and hence many such indicators) where death registration is incomplete by integrating data from Medical Certificates of Cause of Death (MCCOD) for hospital deaths with routine verbal autopsy (VA) for community deaths.