Stumbling around in the dark

The Lancet: "For much of the world, scientists rely on guesswork to understand what makes people sick and why they die. True, the guesswork is based on sophisticated surveys, sampling studies, and other techniques of data collection and analysis, but it is guesswork nonetheless. In a study in this week's Lancet, for example, Igor Rudan and co-workers set out to identify the best information they could find on the four leading causes of death in children worldwide: acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea, falciparum malaria, and neonatal disorders."