By Michael Ollove
Stateline.org
Robert Anderson may know more about death than anybody else in the United States.
Anderson is chief of mortality statistics for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Information about death flows into his suburban Maryland office from all over the country, detailing not only how many Americans have died—2,596,993 in 2013—but the causes of those deaths. Researchers use the information to learn what kills Americans, and public officials use it to craft policies to improve health and safety.
On the best certificates, the information is accurate and complete. That would mean, for example, that the death certificate would say not only that someone had died of a drug overdose, but that the drug had been heroin. If the departed had died of cardiac arrest, the certificate would say that death resulted from a heart attack and it would disclose that the person had been a lifelong smoker and overweight.
Unfortunately, many death certificates are incomplete or inaccurate. When multiplied across thousands and thousands of cases, such gaps can translate into a faulty understanding of mortality in the United States, and affect how money is spent on research and prevention.
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