What do people die from?
An interactive tool to explore causes of death by age, gender, and time, across the world.
April 13, 2026
If we want to prevent deaths across the world, we need to know what people are dying from.
This interactive tool allows you to do that by visualizing causes of death globally and by country.
The total size of the visualization represents the total number of deaths for a given selection, and the size of each rectangle — each one a different cause of death — is proportional to its share of the total. This is called a treemap.
Using the dropdown menus, you can look at this data for a specific age group (such as children under 5) or for men or women separately. Using the timeline, you can also see how what people die from has changed over time.
What do people die from in different countries?
Explore causes of death data for all countries, spanning more than four decades.
Five million children die every year — what do they die from?
To reduce child mortality, we need to understand what children are dying from.
Does the news reflect what we die from?
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
Contributors & acknowledgements
By Fiona Spooner and Sophia Mersmann.
With contributions from Hannah Ritchie.
Fiona Spooner prepared the data behind this tool, and Sophia Mersmann built the interactive visualization. Hannah Ritchie oversaw the project, wrote the text, and provided feedback on the visualization and its design.
Many thanks to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for feedback and suggestions on this article, to Tuna Acisu for data assistance, and to Daniel Bachler, Marcel Gerber, and Marwa Boukarim for technical and design feedback on the visualization.
Cite this work
Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This page can be cited as:
Fiona Spooner and Sophia Mersmann (2026) - “What do people die from?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/featured-viz/what-do-people-die-from' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-what-do-people-die-from,
author = {Fiona Spooner and Sophia Mersmann},
title = {What do people die from?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/featured-viz/what-do-people-die-from}
}
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