This question is essential to guide decisions in public health, and find ways to save lives.
Many leading causes of death receive little mainstream attention. If news reports reflected what children died from, they would say that around 1,400 young children die from diarrheal diseases, 1,000 die from malaria, and 1,900 from respiratory infections – every day.
This can change. Over time, death rates from these causes have declined across the world.
A better understanding of the causes of death has led to the development of technologies, preventative measures, and better healthcare, reducing the chances of dying from a wide range of different causes, across all age groups.
In the past, infectious diseases dominated. But death rates from infectious diseases have fallen quickly – faster than other causes. This has led to a shift in the leading causes of death. Now, non-communicable diseases – such as heart diseases and cancers – are the most common causes of death globally.
More progress is possible, and the impact of causes of death can fall further.
On this page, you will find global data and research on leading causes of death and how they can be prevented. This includes the number of people dying from each cause, their death rates, how they differ between age groups, and their trends over time.
This data can also help understand the burden of disease more broadly, and offer a lens to see the impacts of healthcare and medicine, habits and behaviours, environmental factors, health infrastructure, and more.
Some causes of death are far more common in some parts of the world than others.
In poorer countries in Africa and Asia – where clean water, sanitation, and access to healthcare are lacking – people are much more likely to die from infectious diseases, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional causes.
However, in wealthier countries, people are much more likely to die from ‘non-communicable diseases’ instead, which include heart diseases and cancers.
This is because of two related points.
First, infectious diseases are much more common in poorer countries, and treatment is often lacking.
Second, deaths from infectious diseases were much more common in wealthier countries in the past. As these causes of death are reduced or eliminated, people tend to live longer and die from other causes instead.4
Therefore, the data needs to be ‘age-standardized’ to see how causes of death vary between countries, among people of the same age. In the chart, you can see an age-standardized comparison of these causes of death.
As you can see, countries with higher death rates from communicable diseases also tend to have higher death rates from non-communicable diseases.
This results from poorer healthcare, income, and living standards, which affect the chances of surviving many kinds of diseases.
You can also move the slider to see how they have shifted over time. Annual death rates have been reduced over time for both categories – but they have dropped faster for communicable diseases.
