About interva.net

What this site is

interva.net documents the verbal autopsy (VA) methodology, the history and principles of the InterVA family of models, the open tools built around the WHO VA standards, and the key scientific literature. It exists because this domain is cited as the InterVA reference in dozens of scientific publications, and readers following those citations deserve an accurate, useful destination.

What this site is not

This is an independent informational resource. It is:

• not affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained by the InterVA project team or Professor Peter Byass;
• not affiliated with Umeå University, the World Health Organization, IHME, the openVA project, or any other institution mentioned here;
• not a source of software — no models or tools are hosted or distributed from this domain; all software links point to official sources such as CRAN, IHME, and the InterVA project pages;
• not a source of medical advice.

Mentions of "InterVA", "SmartVA", "InSilicoVA", and "openVA" are nominative and descriptive, referring to the respective published models and tools.

A note on the domain's history

From approximately 2006 to 2019, interva.net served as the official public entry point of the InterVA project. The homepage was a thin wrapper that redirected visitors — first to the project's pages at Umeå University, later to peterbyass.com — which is why the domain accumulated citations in scientific papers, institutional documentation, and reference works. The project itself is alive and well; its current official home is peterbyass.com/interva, and open-source implementations live on CRAN. This site carries the reference role forward independently, with original content written from the published sources listed in Research.

Who this site is for

Most readers arrive here from a citation: a journal article, a methods report, or a dataset description that points to interva.net as the reference for the InterVA model. The site is written for them — epidemiologists and public-health researchers who need the official sources quickly, students meeting verbal autopsy for the first time, and programme teams comparing the open tools before choosing one for routine mortality surveillance.

How the content is produced

Every page is written from the published primary sources — the WHO instrument documentation and the peer-reviewed papers listed in Research — rather than copied from earlier versions of this domain. Outbound links point only to official locations: the WHO website, CRAN, IHME, openva.net, and the InterVA project pages. When a WHO standard or a software package is updated, the relevant page is revised to match.

Corrections

If you spot a factual error or an outdated link, write to contact@interva.net.