The mortality rate declined 0.1 percent last year compared to 2017 and 426,106 people died, the state-run Turkish Statistical Agency (TurkStat) announced yesterday.

Death Statistics, as it is officially entitled, show that the majority of deaths were men and the crude death rate was recorded as 5.2 per thousand. Like mortality rate for adults, the infant mortality rate dropped only slightly and 11,629 infants died last year. In other words, 9.3 infants per thousand births died in 2018. The highest infant mortality rate was in southern city of Gaziantep at 15.3 per thousand and it was followed by Mardin in southeastern Turkey.

TurkStat says majority of infants died within five months of their births while the rest died before they were a month old.

As for suicides, TurkStat announced that number of people who died in suicides was 3,161 last year while it was 3,168 in 2017. A majority of those who killed themselves were men, at 75.6 percent. TurkStat says about four among every thousand people committed suicide.