Cause-specific death rates can be calculated in one of two ways from information provided by a post-census mortality survey and a national census. This simplest method is to apply the cause-specific mortality fractions from the survey to the death rates determined from the census. For example, if the post-census mortality survey determined that 20 percent of the population died from HIV/AIDS within a certain year and the census calculated the national crude death rate to be 14 per 1,000 population, 0.2*14 gives a cause-specific malarial death rate of 280 per 100,000 population.
Cause-specific death rates can also be calculated directly by dividing the number of people in the post-census mortality survey who died from a specific cause by the number of people residing in the sample area as reported on the census. For example, if the post-census mortality survey found that there were 2,800 malarial deaths in the sample and the census determined that there were one million people living in the sample area, 2,800/1,000,000 gives a malarial death rate of 280 per 100,000 population.
Alert: Global Health Learning will go offline after May 31, 2025. You can use our Print feature to download course content for your reference. Log in, go to a course, click the Print link in the right sidebar. The course pages will be rolled together in one HTML page. You can copy/paste into a Google doc or save as HTML.