Measures of Morbidity and Mortality

BHS210-Module 2 SLP: Measures of Morbidity and Mortality (Uses Of Epidemiology)
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Introduction
Morbidity and mortality are commonly used epidemiological measures, with mortality focusing on the incidence of diseases while mortality focusing on death resulting from diseases. Health indicators like mortality and morbidity rates are important to describe the health status. Equally, users of health indicators may rely on this information to promote health in communities and develop health policies. In any case, health indicators help to identify the risk of diseases that affects a specific population. This paper highlights on the mortality and morbidity rates as measures of epidemiology. It also highlights on the leading causes of death between Haiti and the U.S. Morbidity
Morbidity refers to the state of poor health on diseases prevalence in a population, while comorbidity is a state where a person is afflicted by more than one disease at the same time. The morbidity rate is the incidence of diseases in a population. The units of measurements depend on predicted scores or morbidity scores unlike mortality where death is per 1000 deaths. Since morbidity depends on incidence of a disease, data collected relates to area, gender, and area and disease type. Morbidity rates are important as they indicate the prevalence of a disease as well as areas where the illness is likely to occur in comparison to the population. Some diseases may be specific to certain groups and hence knowing about the morbidity rates helps to minimize risk associated with the illnesses. For instance, the morbidity rate of cardiovascular diseases relates to the deaths that occur because of these diseases annually in a specific community.
Mortality
This relates to the death of persons in a population affected by a disease, the deaths in the specific population are related to the disease. It is calculated as the number of annual deaths per thousand people. There are different forms of mortality rates which capture specific population, infant mortality rate relates to death of children while maternal mortality rate is the incidences of death among mothers. Databases and reports are relied upon to provide statistics on causes of death and mortality including the World Health Statistics which covers numerous countries of the world. Mortality rates are an indicator of the health situation in a population, and it is easier to highlight on the causes of death, when the data is accurate. Mortality rates also help to show whether progress has been made in improving the health situation of a population, as it is possible to compare mortality rates over time with a benchmark.
Leading causes of mortality in the U.S and Haiti
In 20210, the Haiti earthquake had a devastating impact on the country’s health system and infrastructure. The leading cause of death was disaster while the non communicable diseases are stroke, cancer, ischemic heart disease and lower respiratory diseases. The five leading causes of death i...