WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) MORTALITY DATABASE

OVERVIEW

The World Health Organization (WHO) Mortality Database is a collection of death statistics categorized by country or region, year, gender, age, and cause of death, as reported yearly by national authorities from their civil registration and vital statistics systems. It contains records dating from 1950 to the present. Only data with a completeness rate of at least 65% are published in the database.

*The description above is a paraphrased version of the description on the World Health Organization Mortality Database website.

Available Data File Formats

EXCEL, PDF

Accessibility

This is an open data source for public use

How to retrieve data by example;

Scenario

Suppose you want to analyze trends in road traffic accident mortality across Belgium, Germany, and Denmark from 2000 to 2020.

Step-by-step

1. Visit the World Health Organization via: https://www.who.int/

2. Move the mouse pointer to the right, and click on “Data” in red. From the dropdown menu, click on “Mortality Database” marked in yellow.

3. After clicking on “Mortality Database” marked in yellow, this is how the interface would appear.

4.  Scroll down to “Causes of death explorer” and click on “Injuries” marked in red. Click on “Unintentional Injuries”. From the dropdown list, click on “Road traffic accidents”.

5.  After clicking on “Road traffic accidents”, this is how the interface would appear. Make your selection for type of plot, years, age group, data type, country, and sex as identified by various color markings. Finally, click on “Apply filter” marked in black. 

6.  After clicking on “Apply filter”, this is how the chart would appear for the data. The mortality rates from road traffic accidents across Belgium, Germany, and Denmark have been declining over time. To be able to obtain this image, take a screenshot of it using “shift key + window key + S”.

7.  To export the raw data, scroll up and move the mouse pointer to the right and click on “Export data” icon marked in red to download the output.

8.  Click on “Export” in red from the dialog box

9.  Afterwards, this is how the data would appear in Excel.

Be sure to consult with the source website on how to correctly cite your data. For this scenario, the citation in APA would look like this;  

World Health Organization Mortality Database. (2024). Road Traffic Accidents: Trends in cause-specific mortality by country(s) or area(s) for a selected age group and sex https://platform.who.int/mortality/themes/theme-details/topics/indicator-groups/indicator-group-details/MDB/road-traffic-accidents