What do people die from in different countries? -- Our World In Data

[erronis]

https://ourworldindata.org/what-do-people-die-from-in-different-countries

An interactive tool to explore causes of death by age, gender, and time, across the world.

On any average day, 165,000 people die globally. That's 60 million a year. What do they die from?

To answer this, my colleagues Sophia Mersmann and Fiona Spooner built an interactive visualization of causes of death across the world.1 In this article, I'll give a few snapshots of how this compares across countries at different income levels.

But the real power is in exploring the tool for yourself -- you can do that for your own country at the end of this page.

Below, you can see the causes of death for the world as a whole. The total size of the visualization represents the entire 60 million global deaths, and the size of each rectangle -- each one a different cause of death -- is proportional to its share of the total. (This is called a treemap.)

Three-quarters of global deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which are shown in blue. Heart disease alone accounts for one in three deaths. Cancers are almost one in five.

What did people die from in 2023?


The size of the entire visualization represents the total number of deaths globally in 2023: 60.0 million. Each rectangle within is proportional to the share of deaths due to a particular cause.

. . .

[True Dough]

1. When you add up

all the deaths caused by Putin, Trump and Netanyahu, they must be rocketing up the charts.

[bmbmd]

2. Fascinating article. Thanks for posting.

As someone who has completed hundreds of death certificates over the course of my career, I've always felt that there should be a diagnosis code for "got old and just died", which is what I saw in my internal medicine practice. In our country, we are blessed to have an imperfect but sometimes serviceable system of late life health care. We keep the old folks alive in the face of serious infections, complications of falls and fractures, strokes, and assorted cardiac maladies. Most of those deaths in the elderly, when they finally occur, are attributed to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.

[erronis]

3. Thank you. This is a good example of "citizen science" - perhaps done by interested organizations

versus government or medical groups.

I worked a bit in trying to model causes of death based on hospital discharge and claims data. I think the US is amazingly deficient in not having a uniform way of reporting and collecting this type of essential data. Perhaps it has changed recently.

[erronis]

4. More to your point of ascribing a "cause of death"

My father was a dynamic person who never slowed down until a couple of months before his death. He had asthma/emphysema (never smoked) but that didn't get in the way of playing tennis or vigorous walks. He did suffer from urinary tract blockage late and a botched bladder stone removal. Still kept on plugging. At some point he lost the ability to talk (probable stroke), and just gave up on trying. Was ready to die. His death certificate was COPD.

I guess it's hard to sort out the actual cause when there are so many contributors.

[bmbmd]

5. Nail on head.

You hit it.

[Bmoboy]

6. How do wars factor into this?

Or famines or natural disasters (fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc.)?

[erronis]

8. Apparently not at all. It seems that this is only diseases - and probably those identified by doctors.

Obviously starvation, murder, suicides, freezing, and-so-on are huge factors.

[OC375]

7. In 1890, the leading cause was February.

I joke, but not really.