Mortality rate, or death rate, is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1,000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 (out of 1,000) in a population of 1,000 would mean 9.5 deaths per year in that entire population, or 0.95% out of the total. It is distinct from "morbidity", a term used to refer to either the prevalence or incidence of a disease, and also from the incidence rate (the number of newly appearing cases of the disease per unit of time).
Other specific measures of mortality include:
Other measures of mortality used to provide indications of the relative or failure of medical treatment or procedures (for life-threatening illnesses, etc.) include:
Mortality may also be expressed in terms of survival. Thus, the survival rate is equivalent to "1 minus the cumulative death rate" (with "death from all causes", for example, being expressed in terms of overall survival). Censored survival curves that incorporate missing data by using the Kaplan–Meier estimator can sometimes be compared using statistical tests such as the log-rank test or the Cox proportional hazards test.
The ten countries with the highest crude death rate, according to the 2014 CIA World Factbook estimates, are:
See list of countries by death rate for worldwide statistics.