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Data

Death rate from cancer

See all data and research on:
Causes of Death

What you should know about this indicator

The International Classification of Diseases (Version 10) codes that define malignant neoplasms are C00-C97.

Death rate from cancer
Reported deaths from malignant neoplasms in both sexes per 100,000 people.
Source
WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 26, 2024
Next expected update
July 2025
Date range
1950–2022
Unit
deaths per 100,000 people

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Cancer by Our World in Data

Cancer

Saloni Dattani, Veronika Samborska, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser

Explore charts that include this data

Death rates from different causes
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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The WHO mortality database is a collection death registration data including cause-of-death information from member states.

Where they are collected, death registration data are the best source of information on key health indicators, such as life expectancy, and death registration data with cause-of-death information are the best source of information on mortality by cause, such as maternal mortality and suicide mortality.

WHO requests from all countries annual data by age, sex, and complete ICD code (e.g., 4-digit code if the 10th revision of ICD was used). Countries have reported deaths by cause of death, year, sex, and age for inclusion in the WHO Mortality Database since 1950.

The WHO only includes data, which are properly coded according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Today the database is maintained by the WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI) and contains data from over 120 countries and areas. Data reported by member states and selected areas are displayed in this portal’s interactive visualizations if the data are reported to the WHO mortality database in the requested format and at least 65% of deaths were recorded in each country and year.
Retrieved on
July 26, 2024
Retrieved from
https://platform.who.int/mortality
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI), World Health Organization (2024)

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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

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  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Death rate from cancer”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2023) - “Causes of Death”. Data adapted from WHO Mortality Database. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rate-who-mdb [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

WHO Mortality Database (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Death rate from cancer” [dataset]. WHO Mortality Database, “WHO Mortality Database” [original data]. Retrieved December 3, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rate-who-mdb