Minimally Invasive Autopsy: A New Paradigm for Understanding Global Health?

Public health visionaries have long sought good data on mortality patterns in communities. John Graunt published his "Bills of Mortality" for the city of London in the mid-17th century (Fig 1). By the mid-18th century, Pehr Wargentin had instituted national civil registration in Sweden and published mortality analyses Nevertheless, in the 21st century, mortality patterns for the majority of the world's population remain unrecorded, representing a major constraint on global health and development Now, Bill Gates has taken up this challenge through a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) project encouraging the development of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) to fill this gap