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About Half Of All Deaths Don't Have A Recorded Cause

In its annual World Health Statistics report, the WHO found that there's still large gaps in recording how people died.

By: Tyler Adkisson

Posted at 1:12 PM, May 19, 2017

and last updated 2017-05-19 13:12:59-04

Despite all the health records in the modern world, half of all deaths still don't have a reported cause.

But it's getting better. A World Health Organization report found that about 27 million of an estimated 56 million deaths were registered with a cause in 2015.

That's a sizable increase from 10 years prior, when only 33 percent of deaths were registered with a cause.

China, Turkey and Iran were integral to this shift. In 1999, those countries only reported about 5 percent of deaths with a cause. In 2015, that number jumped to 90 percent.

Registering cause of death is important because it helps countries figure out how to best invest in health care, which leads to an overall increase in the health of a population.

The WHO also called for a push toward universal health coverage. About 9 percent of populations included in the study spent more than 10 percent of their household budget on health care.