Egypt: why this data is excluded

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Researchers’ citation

Please cite this page as:

Black, T. R. (2026). Egypt. Retrieved [date], from https://pediatricsuicides.ca/

Author identifier: ORCID 0000-0002-5681-4930
Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22672942

Download the data — every count and denominator on this site, as CSV, with notes.

Struggling with suicide?هل تحتاج إلى مساعدة؟ لست وحدك.

In the US and Canada, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Trevor Project supports LGBTQ+ young people at 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678.

Help, wherever you are. هل تحتاج إلى مساعدة؟ لست وحدك.
Ministry of Health mental health and addiction line 16328 (24 hours). Also 0800 888 0700 or +20 2 20816831.

Data from WHO Mortality Database (ICD-10), Egypt produce the following chart of suicides 0–19:

Show the numbers behind this view

Year	Deaths	Person-years	Combined	Girls	Boys
2000	13	34,951,332	0.04	0.03	0.04
2001	9	35,374,663	0.03	0.03	0.02
2002	17	35,787,840	0.05	0.07	0.03
2003	18	36,174,557	0.05	0.05	0.05
2004	12	36,535,631	0.03	0.03	0.03
2005	9	36,886,865	0.02	0.03	0.02
2006	15	37,239,189	0.04	0.04	0.04
2007	9	37,608,578	0.02	0.03	0.02
2008	4	38,005,108	0.01	0.01	0.01
2009	9	38,450,177	0.02	0.02	0.03
2010	13	38,971,178	0.03	0.03	0.04
2011	35	39,597,414	0.09	0.05	0.13
2012	59	40,337,596	0.15	0.10	0.19
2013	31	41,198,305	0.08	0.04	0.10
2014	14	42,129,106	0.03	0.02	0.05
2015	13	43,065,918	0.03	0.03	0.03
2016	10	43,969,494	0.02	0.01	0.04
2017	11	44,806,142	0.02	0.02	0.03
2018	10	45,499,188	0.02	0.03	0.01
2019	24	46,014,221	0.05	0.04	0.06

Egypt's data must be rejected due to data quality issues.

WHO grades Egypt’s cause-of-death data “low”. For the Global Health Estimates, WHO rates a country’s vital registration on how complete it is and what share of deaths carry a usable cause code, then sorts the result into high, medium, low and very low. Registration here is essentially complete for ages 15 and over, so the grade is about how deaths are CODED rather than whether they are counted. A death that was never registered, or registered to a cause nobody can use, is not in the figures on this page, so read them as a floor rather than as a count.

Editorially, I have to make the decision to amputate this country from the world’s rates not because its suicides don’t matter, but because there is an issue that makes the statistics of including them in a global database impossible.

In 20 years of data, with almost ONE BILLION person years of data collection, Egypt has recorded 604 suicides under the age of 24. This rate (0.04 per 100,000 per year) is so low that it is implausible. I have no doubt that this data is unreliable and should not be considered the truth about Egyptian suicides. At the same time, internally there are recorded suicides here, so I leave the data up for analysis.

I visually inspected the histogram, considered the prior probabilities, reviewed the GHE quality grades for completeness, and arrived at a cutoff of 0.5 per 100k per year. I also ran two mathematical tests, Otsu and a 2-component gaussian mixture with a posterior = 0.5, and arrived at mathematical cut lines of 0.504 and 0.463, respectively.

If you are from this country or know more about their statistics, collections, or issues, please email me at dr.tylerblack@gmail.com. I apologize to anyone offended, and I include this page for data transparency.

Human-reviewed8 September 2026review process vetting-v1

Every page on this site was looked at by me, one at a time, before it was published. This is exactly what that involved, and what it did not.

What I checked

The numbers, year by year: deaths and the population they are counted against, from the file the page is built from.
That the arithmetic agrees with itself. A rate equals its deaths over its person-time, every interval contains the rate it belongs to, the sexes add up to the combined figure, and no year appears twice or goes missing. These are checked by machine on every build, and I read what it reports.
The case definition and the age band, against what the source publishes, and whether either changes part-way through the series.
The source, its link and the date it was retrieved.
Every chart view the page offers, drawn, and read.
WHO's own grade for the country's cause-of-death data, where there is one, and whether the page reads more confidently than that grade allows.
The prose, against the numbers it describes.

What I did not

I did not re-obtain the primary source documents or re-key the data from them. Where a national statistics office publishes a figure, this site carries that figure.
This is not a re-analysis. I have not attempted to correct, adjust or model around a country's counting; I have shown what it published and said what I know about how it was counted.
Being reviewed does not mean a series is comparable with any other. It means I have looked at it and said what it is.

Automated checks ran over every page and I read their output. A language model was used on some pages to suggest things worth a second look; nothing it produced is published, and nothing it said stands as a finding on its own.

A review is a point in time. If the data behind a page changes afterwards, the page does not ship again until it has been looked at again — that rule is enforced when the site is deployed, not left to memory.