U.S. County-Level Mortality and Population Data 1999-2006

CDC WONDER's Mortality - Multiple Cause of Death dataset provides county-level national mortality and population data spanning 1999-2006. The data, produced by the National Center for Health Statistics, are based on death certificates for U.S. residents, each containing a single underlying cause of death, up to twenty additional multiple causes, and demographic data. Users can obtain death counts, crude and age-adjusted death rates, standard errors, and confidence intervals segmented by place, age group, race, Hispanic ethnicity, sex, year, and cause-of-death.

Use Cases

• Analyze age-adjusted death rates segmented by county, race, and cause-of-death (ICD-10 code) to identify geographic health disparities.
• Model mortality trends by year of death and demographic variables like sex and age group, including infants.
• Investigate patterns in multiple causes of death (up to 20 per record) alongside the single underlying cause for specific diseases.

Strengths

• Data spans 8 years (1999-2006) of national mortality records.
• Includes detailed demographic segmentation by county, state, age group, race, sex, and (for 2005-2006) Hispanic origin categories.
• Provides multiple analytical metrics per record: number of deaths, crude death rates, age-adjusted death rates, standard errors, and 95% confidence intervals.

Limitations

• Race and Hispanic ethnicity categorization is inconsistent, split across two separate datasets for 1999-2004 (3 race groups) and 2005-2006 (4 race groups, 3 Hispanic origin categories).
• Data is temporally stale, with the latest year covered being 2006.
• Sample data and specific row/column counts are unavailable for assessing dataset scale and structure.

Provenance

Source

National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Collection Method

Data are based on death certificates for U.S. residents.

Time Range

1999-2006

Freshness

Dataset metadata was last updated on 2025-07-29, but the underlying data coverage ends in 2006.

Geography

United States, at the national, state, and county levels.