​More than half of world's deaths lack recorded causes: WHO

#WorldHealthOrganization, #Marie-PauleKieny, #U.N.SustainableDevelopmentGoals

Geneva, May 17 (Canadian-Media): More than half of global deaths lack recorded cause, making it difficult for effective health monitoring and policymaking, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, media reports said.

Image credit: WHO official

In spite of significant improvements in recent years, many countries still fail to collect high-quality health data, Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO's assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, said in a statement, CBCNews reports said.
 
"If countries don't know what makes people get sick and die, it's a lot harder to know what to do about it," she said and added that  WHO was working with countries to make health information systems stronger and improve data quality.​

​Several countries, including China and Turkey, said WHO,  had improved their data collection strategy. WHO stated that Iran had recorded 90 percent of deaths with details of the causes, compared with 5 percent in 1999.

WHO report, this year, focused on the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of internationally approved targets, adopted in 2015 to track issues such as health, climate, sanitation and economic inequality.
 
According to WHO’s findings maternal and newborn death rates are declining. Global neonatal mortality rate in 2015 was 19 per 1,000 live births and the under-five death rate was 43 per 1,000 live births.

About 830 women every day died due to complications of pregnancy or childbirth, WHO reported.
 
Looking at infectious diseases, WHO reported that an estimated 2.1 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2015, which was 35 percent fewer than in 2000.

WHO reported that in 2015 there were an estimated 212 million malaria cases, and about 60 percent of the population at risk of the mosquito-borne disease had access to an insecticide-treated net 2015, compared to 34 percent in 2010.