Mortality in the World 1970-2010
The Global Burden of Disease, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010), a project led by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington and published in seven papers in an special edition of The Lancet on December 2012, has produced a comprehensive set of population health metrics, including number of deaths, death rates among others. Multiple datasets from GBD 2010 are freely available to the public at the Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) section of the IHME web site.
This article aims to highlight the magnitude, distribution and trends of mortality in the World. To cover this subject, mortality or death rate, measured as number of deaths per 100,000 population is the health metric used. The data is available online at Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010) Mortality Results 1970-2010.
The data visualization bellow shows the mortality in the World and by regions for the last 40 years, with data points for every ten years since 1970 to 2010. For exploratory and discovery analysis, mortality data is breakdown by sex and age groups. Three data views dynamically linked in this interactive visualization allows you to explore the magnitude of mortality for a selected age group and year (top-left view), trend of mortality by sex and selected age group (top-right view), and the mortality profile by age and sex for a selected year (bottom view). As this is an interactive data visualization, we encourage you to interact using the slider to change the year, select an specific age group, hovering to get additional details and clicking on any region to highlight it across the data visualization.
In the World there is an important decrease in the number of deaths (risk of dying) from 1970 to 2010 in general population (all age groups) and specific age groups. This progress is occurring in most of the regions with exceptions such as Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. General mortality in Eastern Europe increased from 901 deaths per 100,000 population in 1990 to 1,434 deaths per 100,000 population in 2010 with a significant increase from 1990 to 2000 mainly in men population. Mortality in the Caribbean increased in the last decade --from 2000 to 2010-- determined by men population.
In spite of the decrease in number of deaths in most of the regions, it is interesting to see that the number of regions with mortality rate higher that the Global mortality rate increased from 1990 to 2010. Use the slider to change years and seing theses results. Explore by yourself the magnitude, distribution and trend of age specific mortality selecting every age group.
The chart "Age and sex mortality profile", located beneath the bar chart showing mortality across regions, show other interesting part of the story "mortality by age and sex". In this chart every line represents a region and allows us to see how death rate varies along age group. Changing the year from 1990 to 2010 makes possible to visualize how the death has been postponed to older age, what is something desirable, and how the mortality increased in young population mainly in less that 5 years old population.
There is an increase in the number of deaths among adults aged 15 to 49 between 1990 and 2010, having Southern sub-Sahara Africa, Eastern sub-Sahara Africa and the Caribbean the worst situation. This is in part due to increases in violence and the ongoing challenge of HIV/AIDS, which kills 1.5 million people annually.
These results show important achievements in mortality since 1970 to 2010 such as a significant drop in child mortality and death postponed to older age, meaning that people are living longer.
Readers are encouraged to interact with the above data visualization and explore more the magnitude, distribution and trends of mortality in the World and regions. Please don't forget to leave your comments, thoughts and suggestions.