Estimating AIDS mortality from burial surveillance data in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Georges Reniers, University of Pennsylvania
Tekebash Araya, Addis Ababa University
Eduard J. Sanders, Wellcome Trust

We use verbal autopsies as well as data from an ongoing surveillance of burials for investigating patterns in AIDS mortality by age, sex and migration status. Verbal autopsy results provide direct estimates; the other method relies on the lay diagnosis of the cause of death reported by relatives registering the burial. In a first step, the diagnostic value of these lay diagnoses is investigated in a sample of burial records that were linked with a hospital record (with and without information on serostatus), and in a sample of cases with a verbal autopsy result. In a second step, the diagnostic indicators are used for extrapolating AIDS mortality estimates to the population of Addis Ababa. Both methods attribute 60-70% of adult deaths to AIDS. The sex and age pattern of these estimates is comparable to published results, but intriguing gender differences appear when they are disaggregated by migration status.