The Human Mortality Database (HMD) is a joint initiative of the Department of Demographics at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

and the

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is located in Rostock, Germany. It was founded in 1996 by James Vaupel and moved into new buildings in Rostock in 2002. It is one of approximately 80 institutes of the Max Planck Society ...

Rostock Rostock (), officially the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock (german: link=no, Hanse- und Universitätsstadt Rostock), is the largest city in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and lies in the Mecklenburgian part of the state, c ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

that provides detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The key people involved are John R. Wilmoth (Director) from the University of California, Berkeley, Vladimir Shkolnikov (Co-Director) from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and Magali Barbieri (Associate Director) from the University of California, Berkeley, and INED, Paris.

History

Creation of the Berkeley Mortality Database, a precursor to the Human Mortality Database

In 1997, John R. Wilmoth at the Department of Demography in the

started work on a database titled the Berkeley Mortality Database (BMD) with a grant from the

National Institute of Aging The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIA itself is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand the ...

in the

. The BMD included data across the entire age range, but was restricted to only four countries (

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, and the

). For the most part, the Berkeley Mortality Database is now superseded by the Human Mortality Database, but the BMD is still available online because some types of data available in the BMD have not been transferred to the HMD.

Creation and development of the Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality

The Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality (KTD) was founded in 1993 by Väinö Kannisto and

Roger Thatcher Arthur Roger Thatcher (22 October 1926 – 13 February 2010), commonly known as Roger Thatcher or sometimes as A. Roger Thatcher, was a British statistician. Thatcher was born in Birmingham and spent his formative early years in Wilmslow, Chesh ...

with the support and collaboration of James Vaupel, Kirill Andreev, and many others. The KTD was first developed at Odense University Medical School in

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

. Since 1996, it has been maintained and developed by the

. Unlike the BMD, the KTD focused only on mortality above the age of 80, but included 30 countries (compared to the BMD, that included data for only 4 countries).

Creation and development of the Human Mortality Database

HMD began in 2000 as a collaborative project of the Department of Demographics at the

in the

and the

, with funding from the

in the

. It used data from the BMD (which had launched in 1997) and was also strongly influenced by the Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality. After about two years of development, the HMD was formally launched in May 2002. HMD inherited the coverage of all age groups from BMD and the coverage of a diverse range of countries from KTD, thus combining the best features of both databases. The methods protocol of HMD has steadily evolved and was last updated on May 31, 2007.

Short-term Mortality Fluctuations data series (STMF)

In response to the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

pandemic, the HMD team decided in 2020 to establish a new data resource: Short-term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) data series in order to provide objective and internationally comparable data. Weekly death counts provide the most objective and comparable way of assessing the scale of short-term mortality elevations across countries and time. These data are collected for 38 countries: Austria, Australia (Doctor certified deaths), Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England and Wales, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the USA. Sources are national Statitstics Office or european organisation

Eurostat Eurostat ('European Statistical Office'; DG ESTAT) is a Directorate-General of the European Commission located in the Kirchberg, Luxembourg, Kirchberg quarter of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Eurostat's main responsibilities are to provide statis ...

, based on official

Vital record Vital records are records of life events kept under governmental authority, including birth certificates, marriage licenses (or marriage certificates), separation agreements, divorce certificates or divorce party and death certificates. In some ...

(excepted for Australia: Doctor certified deaths) STMF Data are published under a CC-BY 4.0 License. They are available through an online STMF visualization toolkit or downloadable in CSV or

XLSX Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version a ...

format.

Reception

Academic reception

HMD data has been cited in academic research in demographic research and other research that relies of demographic data. For instance, there has been considerable research on the biological and evolutionary factors determining mortality and the differences in mortality across human populations. The data has also been cited in research that attempts to build better predictive models of human mortality. It has also been cited in research on specific causes of mortality and research on the social and economic consequences of changes in mortality.

Media reception

HMD data has been cited in the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'', and ''

Foreign Affairs ''Foreign Affairs'' is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and ...

''.

References

External links

{{official website, www.mortality.org Longevity Scientific databases