PLoS medicine
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Marlieke de Kraker and colleagues reflect on the need for better global estimates for the burden of antimicrobial resistance.
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There is an urgent need to identify tools able to provide reliable information on the cause of death in low-income regions, since current methods (verbal autopsy, clinical records, and complete autopsies) are either inaccurate, not feasible, or poorly accepted. We aimed to compare the performance of a standardized minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) approach with that of the gold standard, the complete diagnostic autopsy (CDA), in a series of adults who died at Maputo Central Hospital in Mozambique. ⋯ A simple MIA procedure can identify the cause of death in many adult deaths in Mozambique. This tool could have a major role in improving the understanding and surveillance of causes of death in areas where infectious diseases are a common cause of mortality.
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Peter Byass reflects on the potential niche for minimally invasive autopsies in determining cause-of-death in low- and middle-income countries.