App has death covered

摘要

Cause of death? Unknown. That is the case for at least half of the 55 million or so people who die each year. In many parts of the world there are simply too few doctors to make the diagnosis. Deaths are either not registered, or the cause is a guess or left blank on the death certificate. "Both of these things are equally useless for public policy," says Alan Lopez at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Knowing why people die is essential for managing a country's health system. To tackle the problem, Lopez and his colleagues have developed an app that they say can work out cause of death more accurately than a human doctor. This lets anyone with a smartphone or tablet issue a death certificate.