Mortality and Morbidity

Morbidity is a state in which a person is actually alive but affected with ill-health and not in a position to perform any solid mental or physical work. If health is understood as a state of complete physical, mental and social well being, morbidity is a situation in which one of the above conditions must be essentially missing. In a state of morbidity, a person can be deformed, deficient, mentally depressed, feeling ill and so on. Illness, disability, handicap and other compromised states of well-being physical, social and mental-all constitute critical dimensions of health. These attributes of sickness are termed as morbidity (Murray and Chen. 1992). It was generally held that morbidity and disability levels were in parity with mortality levels. But the recent researches have revealed that mortality and morbidity may have differing levels, patterns and trends (Murray, 1998). Understanding sickness is significant in populations experiencing very high mortality. However, both the concept of morbidity and its measurement are plagued by conceptual and methodological difficulties. Different morbidity indicators (clinical / self-perceived) may capture entirely different aspects.