Human Mortality Database
The Human Mortality Database is a joint initiative of the Department of Demographics at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany 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 from the University of California, Berkeley,
Vladimir Shkolnikov from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and Magali Barbieri 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 University of California, Berkeley started work on a database titled the Berkeley Mortality Database with a grant from the National Institute of Aging in the United States. The BMD included data across the entire age range, but was restricted to only four countries.For the most part, the Berkeley Mortality Database is now superseded by the Human Mortality Database, but the BMD is still available online because some types of data available in the BMD have not been transferred to the HMD.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 was founded in 1993 by Väinö Kannisto and Roger Thatcher 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. Since 1996, it has been maintained and developed by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.Unlike the BMD, the KTD focused only on mortality above the age of 80, but included 30 countries.
Creation and development of the Human Mortality Database
HMD began in 2000 as a collaborative project of the Department of Demographics at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, with funding from the National Institute of Aging in the United States. It used data from the BMD 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 pandemic, the HMD team decided in 2020 to establish a new data resource: Short-term Mortality Fluctuations 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, 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 Statistics Office or european organisation Eurostat, based on official Vital record
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 format.