Should verbal autopsy results for malaria be adjusted to improve validity?
Alexander K Rowe Malaria Branch, Division of Parasitic Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mailstop F22, 4770 Buford Highway, Atlanta, GA 30341-3724, USA. E-mail: axr9{at}cdc.gov’ + u + ‘@’ + d + ”//–> Sirs Verbal autopsies performed in community settings are a key data source for determining probable causes of death in areas where vital registration data are unreliable.1,2 However, validation studies of the verbal autopsy method in which verbal autopsy diagnoses are compared with gold standard diagnoses (based on clinical and laboratory data) show that verbal autopsies have low sensitivity (range: 24 75%) and moderate specificity (range: 77 100%) for identifying deaths caused by malaria (i.e. verbal autopsies often miss true malaria deaths and misclassify non-malaria deaths as malaria).1,3 8 Theoretically, results from verbal autopsy validation studies could be used to adjust the proportion of deaths attributable to malaria
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