Federal data guide
US Public Health Data
A guide to the federal datasets behind US public health — how Americans die and how that has changed, the injury, overdose, and suicide records, the small-area chronic-disease and health-behavior estimates, and the disease and outbreak surveillance systems. Nearly all of it comes from the CDC. Each links to a full deep-dive.
The CDC, through the National Center for Health Statistics and its surveillance programs, runs the data systems that define American public health. Death certificates feed the mortality databases; the National Violent Death and injury systems track external causes; PLACES and BRFSS estimate chronic disease and health behavior down to the neighborhood; and NNDSS and the outbreak systems track communicable disease in near-real time. Read together they answer how Americans get sick and die, where, and how fast it is changing. The guides below group the deep-dives by theme and point to the cross-dataset analyses.
Mortality & cause of death
The death-certificate systems behind every cause-of-death analysis.
- CDC WONDER: The Federal Mortality Database Behind Every Cause-of-Death Analysis — the queryable mortality system
- CDC Leading Causes of Death by State: The Federal Ranking of How Americans Die — the top-ten causes, by state
- CDC Excess Deaths: The Federal Measure of How Many More Americans Died Than Expected — deaths above the expected baseline
Injury, overdose & suicide
The external-cause mortality records.
- CDC Injury Mortality: The Federal Record of How Americans Die from Firearms, Overdoses, and Crashes — firearms, overdoses, and crashes
- CDC WISQARS: The Federal Injury and Violence Mortality Database Behind Public Health Research — injury and violence statistics
- CDC Drug Overdose Mortality: The Federal Database Behind the US Opioid Crisis — overdose deaths over time
- CDC Suicide Mortality: The Federal Record of a Public-Health Crisis Over Seven Decades — suicide rates across decades
Chronic disease & risk factors
Small-area estimates of disease prevalence and health behavior.
- CDC PLACES: The Small Area Health Estimates Behind County and Census Tract Disease Prevalence Data — neighborhood-level disease estimates
- CDC BRFSS: The World’s Largest Telephone Survey and the Federal Health Behavior Database — the health-behavior survey
- CDC Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity: The Federal Surveillance Record of American Health Behavior — nutrition, activity, and obesity
Outbreaks & disease surveillance
Reportable disease and foodborne-outbreak tracking.
- CDC NNDSS: The Federal Database Behind Reportable Disease Surveillance in the United States — notifiable-disease surveillance
- CDC Foodborne Outbreak Data: The Federal Database Behind Every US Food Poisoning Investigation — foodborne-outbreak investigations
Cross-dataset analyses
Synthesis guides that join several of the datasets above.
- Mortality in America: Assembling the Full Picture from Federal Death Data — five CDC mortality datasets, joined
- The Opioid Epidemic in Three Federal Datasets: Distribution, Death, and Treatment — distribution + death + treatment
- The Food Safety System: Joining CDC Outbreaks with FSIS and FDA Recalls — outbreaks joined to recalls
More guides at Federal data guides, or browse all writing and the full dataset catalog.