Relatives of the recently deceased are helping to pin down the causes of deaths in India, and boost public health, says epidemiologist Prabhat Jha
You are conducting a million "verbal autopsies" in India. What are they?
The idea is to ask people in a simple way what happened to their family member who died, and they describe patterns that doctors can use to infer the cause of death. This approach has been used on a small scale to categorise children's deaths in India and Bangladesh since the 1970s. For this study we extended it to include adult deaths at a national scale.
What inspired you to investigate adult deaths?
The vast majority of the 10 million deaths in India each year occur outside the formal healthcare system. They aren't medically certified – and we are left with very little information on how people died.
When my grandfather passed away in 1975 aged ...
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