OBJECTIVE To estimate how many deaths from cancer have been avoided in England and Wales because of recent improvements in survival. DESIGN Analysis of national statistics. SETTING England and Wales. SUBJECTS 1.5 million adults with diagnosis of one of 47 different cancers during 1981-5 or 1986-90. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Reduction in number of cancer deaths within five years of diagnosis...

Jonas Licurgo Ferreira was drunk the night he crashed his car. The 41-year-old resident of Rio de Janeiro had been drinking heavily with a soldier friend who was messing around with a gun in the car when it happened. He hit a post. The gun went off, putting a bullet into Ferreira’s spine. “Now I am paraplegic because of a gunshot,” he says. But he knows that the real harm was done by the alcoho...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The burden of premature mortality due to opioid-related death has not been fully characterized. We calculated temporal trends in the proportion of deaths attributable to opioids and estimated years of potential life lost (YLL) due to opioid-related mortality in Ontario, Canada. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Ontario, Canada. PARTICIPANTS Individuals who died of ...

In this issue of International Journal of Epidemiology, Gajalakshmi and Peto publish their results from a community study of deaths from injury in a rural district of Tamil Nadu, south India. The results reported are just one component of a large verbal autopsy study in which families were interviewed about the cause of death of 38 836 people. The study adds greatly to our knowledge of the epid...

Drowning kills 372 000 people yearly worldwide and is a serious public health issue in the Philippines. This study aims to determine if the drowning death rates in the Philippine Health Statistics (PHS) reports from 1980 to 2011 were underestimated. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted to describe the trend of deaths caused by drowning in the Philippines from official and unofficial ...

According to the latest update from the National Cancer Institute (February 1988), "the age adjusted mortality rate for all cancers combined except lung cancer has been declining since 1950 for all individual age groups except 85 and above."['] That represents a 13-percent decrease overall, 44 000 deaths below expected, and a 0.1-percent increase in the over-85 group (unless otherwise noted, al...

Study objective: The UK government called for a 40% reduction in cardiovascular disease mortality in those aged under 75 by 2010. This paper examines the potential for cardiovascular risk factor changes to reduce coronary heart disease deaths in Scotland, and then extrapolates the findings to the UK population. Design: Secondary analysis of published data using a previously validated mortality ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The UK government called for a 40% reduction in cardiovascular disease mortality in those aged under 75 by 2010. This paper examines the potential for cardiovascular risk factor changes to reduce coronary heart disease deaths in Scotland, and then extrapolates the findings to the UK population. DESIGN Secondary analysis of published data using a previously validated mortality ...

BACKGROUND There are few published data describing the mortality burden associated with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection in children in low- and middle-income countries and particularly from Africa and settings with high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). METHODS We modeled the excess mortality attributable to influenza (seasonal and pandemic) and RSV i...

OBJECTIVE To identify the long-term patterns of drowning mortality in the state of Victoria, Australia, and to describe the historical context in which the decrease occurred. METHODS We obtained data on drowning deaths and population statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and its predecessors for the period 1861 to 2000. From these data, we calculated drowning death rates per 100...