GENEVA (AFP) --Two-thirds of deaths and more than one-third of births worldwide go unregistered every year, hampering efforts to keep tabs on global health, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

Launching a campaign to ensure civil registration is carried out in all countries, the WHO said it only had reliable data on individual causes of death from 31 of its 193 member states.
""No single UN agency is responsible for ensuring that births and deaths are registered, so it has fallen between the cracks,"" WHO Director General Margaret Chan said in a statement.
""Without the statistics that these systems produce, we can only have a partial view of the impact of 120 billion dollars spent annually in official development aid,"" she added.
Every year, 48 million of 128 million births worldwide go unregistered. Thirty-eight million of 57 million deaths a year suffer the same fate, according to the WHO.
The national data is needed to correctly assess the health threats faced by a local population, their priority needs and to set up effective programs to help them.
The problem is most acute in developing countries, where registration is non existent or rudimentary, according to studies cited by the UN health agency.