Childhood cause-specific mortality in rural Western Kenya: application of the InterVA-4 model.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Assessing the progress in achieving the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals in terms of population health requires consistent and reliable information on cause-specific mortality, which is often rare in resource-constrained countries. Health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSS) have largely used medical personnel to review and assign likely causes of death based on the information gathered from standardized verbal autopsy (VA) forms. However, this approach is expensive and time consuming, and it may lead to biased results based on the knowledge and experience of individual clinicians. We assessed the cause-specific mortality for children under 5 years old (under-5 deaths) in Siaya County, obtained from a computer-based probabilistic model (InterVA-4).

SUBMITTER: Amek NO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4221497 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature