Designing verbal autopsy studies

Table 1 Absolute error rates with and without a symptom that has very high sensitivity for the first cause of death.

	Number of Symptoms
	20	30	50
Absolute Error for First Cause of Death
With high sensitivity symptom	0.0128	0.0120	0.0123
Without high sensitivity symptom	0.0128	0.0124	0.0124
Mean Absolute Error
With high sensitivity symptom	0.0090	0.0081	0.0084
Without high sensitivity symptom	0.0092	0.0082	0.0085

The first and second row of each pair are very similar, which illustrates the irrelevance of finding symptoms with high sensitivity.

ISSN: 1478-7954