Articles referring to mortality in children were identified from previous reviews, a searches of Medline and unpublished work, as well as an extensive, unpublished electronic and a paper-based search were done by the Department of Child Health of the World Health Organization. Keywords in the search of electronic databases were “pneumonia”, “acute respiratory infections”, “childhood mortality” and “deaths”, and “verbal autopsies”.
The variability can be reduced if care is taken only to