Data use & disclaimer

Vital Signs displays a statistical model, not a registry. Every pulse on the map is generated by a Poisson process whose intensity is a country's published annual crude birth or death rate applied to its published population. No individual birth or death is observed, verified, reported, or identifiable here, and no pulse corresponds to a real person or a real event at the time or place it appears.

Nothing on this site is official statistics, medical, demographic, financial, or legal advice. Do not rely on it for research, reporting, policy, or any decision with real consequences. Consult the primary sources below instead.

National rate and population figures come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI), distributed as public indicator CSV downloads. The vital-rate series in WDI are derived from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects, together with national statistical offices and other UN agencies.

• SP.POP.TOTL · World Bank series, last updated 2026-07-13
• AG.LND.TOTL.K2 · World Bank series, last updated 2026-07-13
• SP.DYN.CBRT.IN · World Bank series, last updated 2026-07-13
• SP.DYN.CDRT.IN · World Bank series, last updated 2026-07-13
• SP.DYN.LE00.IN · World Bank series, last updated 2026-07-13

Local snapshot taken 2026-09-07.

World Bank World Development Indicators data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, subject to the World Bank Data Catalog terms of use. This site attributes the World Bank as the source and has modified the data by aggregating, rescaling, and modeling it. The World Bank does not endorse this site or vouch for any figure derived from its data here.

United Nations population data is used in line with the World Population Prospects terms and the United Nations terms of use. The United Nations is not responsible for, and does not endorse, any derived figure, transformation, or interpretation presented here.

Country boundaries are drawn from Natural Earth public-domain geometry. Boundaries, names, and shading imply no judgement on the legal status of any territory, on the delimitation of any frontier, or on the recognition of any state.

Rates are annual national averages, spread evenly across the year and placed at country centroids. Real births and deaths cluster by season, hour, sub-national region, and event; this model does not. Countries without a complete published set of rates are drawn unshaded and never emit pulses, so global counters understate world totals. Figures are revised by the source agencies from time to time, and the snapshot on this site may lag those revisions.

The site is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability. To the fullest extent permitted by law, no liability is accepted for any loss arising from use of this site or of the data presented on it.

The map runs entirely from published aggregate statistics. It contains no personal data about any individual, and none of the pulses represent identifiable people.