MORTALITY TRENDS

• Trends in national mortality rates •

Graphs showing time trends in mortality rates

Special graphs

Click on links at right.

'Curiosity is the appetite of the mind.'

—CA Mace The Psychology of Study (1932)

'An insatiable curiosity, a fabulous imagination, acute observation, and ruthless logic.'

—Simon Singh The Big Bang (2004)

'The harshest examiner… is not a scientist's peers, but reality itself.'

—The Economist (28 September 2003)

'The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth.'

—Hermann Hesse, Reflections (1974)

'There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature.'

—William Whewell, quoted by Peter Medawar in Pluto's Republic (1982)

'Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.'

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958)

'What we see, we see from the very first as something. This is how we enable it to present itself to us. What we cannot see as something we do not see at all.'

'The most intriguing concealed truths we can be offered are about what lies most plainly in our view.'

—Michael Frayn, Constructions (1974)

'No good model ever accounted for all the facts since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.'

—James Watson, quoted by Francis Crick in Some Mad Pursuit (1988)

'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'

—Title of an article by Eugene Wigner in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics (1960)

'Science is the knowledge of consequences, and the dependence of one fact upon another.'

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

'The scientific method can teach us nothing beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.'

—Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950)

'Science explains things in terms of the interactions of simpler things…'

—Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion (2006)

'It is useless to do with more what can be done with less.'

—William of Ockham (c. 1288 - c. 1348), translated by Sharon Key & Robert Martin in On Ockham (2000)

'More is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.'

—Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

'For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.'

—Ernst Mayr, in the foreword to a 2003 facsimile of the first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species

'If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.'

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)

'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.'

—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1874)

'Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.'

—Bertrand Russell, quoted by Simon Singh in Fermat's Last Theorem (1998)

'When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.'

—Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong (1989)

'Imagination is the energising force of science as well as of poetry, but in science imagination and a critical evaluation of its products are integrally combined.'

'We assert a postulate and take an axiom for granted, but hypotheses we merely venture to propose.'

'…the intensity of the conviction with which we believe a theory to be true has no bearing upon its validity except in so far as it produces a proportionately strong inducement to find out whether it is true or not.'

—Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (1982)

'Each problem has to be tackled first through achieving a thorough understanding of its nature and then by working out what is the most direct and simplest way of achieving an answer.'

—Richard Doll, interviewed by Sarah Darby, Epidemiology (2003)

'Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity. Reductionism is the way to understand it. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism, makes science.'

—E. O. Wilson, Consilience (1998)

'Abstraction is the process of turning complex problems we cannot completely describe into simpler ones that we think we can solve. But gauging which simplification is appropriate requires judgement and experience.'

—John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly (2010)

'Science is not democratic. You can't find out the truth about the Universe by taking a vote. You have to use the best equipment to make the best observations, and you have to be excellent at understanding and interpreting the observations.'

—Maurice Wilkins, The Third Man of the Double Helix (2003)

'One can lose important aspects of the general pattern by concentrating too strictly upon intricate details.'

'Coincidences recede into improbability as more and more independent items coagulate to form a pattern. The mark of any good theory is that it makes coordinated sense of a string of observations otherwise independent and inexplicable.'

—Stephen Jay Gould , The Richness of Life (1988)

'The human being is prone to seeing patterns and will often see patterns where only random noise exists.'

—David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea (2001)

'We underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns when none exist.'

—James Surowiecki , New Yorker (2006)

'We see patterns where there is only random noise.'

—Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (2008)

'…the eye tends to pick out linear patterns even in random noise.'

—Michael Seldner et al., quoted by Edward Tufte in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983)

'The human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present.'

'We forget most of the insignificant coincidences and remember the meaningful ones.'

—Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (1997)

'…large amounts of money can be made by people able to spin far-fetched but portentous-sounding yarns about coincidences.'

—David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2009)

'Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence.'

—Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

[see also Marcello Truzzi]

'A wise man… proportions his belief to the evidence.'

—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [chap. 10.4] (1748)

'Scientific statements can only attain continuous degrees of probability whose unattainable upper and lower limits are truth and falsity.'

'The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever.'

—Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)

'The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.'

—Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo (1939)

'Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.'

—Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963)

'In a sort of cosmic reincarnation, every atom in our bodies resided in several different stars before the formation of our sun and has been part of perhaps millions of different organisms since Earth formed.'

—Peter Ward and Dan Brownlee, Rare Earth (2000)

'We, our Earth and ourselves, are the creation not just of some local cloud, but of other stars and their ejecta. Through the action of this thronging population of aging stars and of its magnetic field, we are the children of the entire Galaxy.'

—James Kaler, Extreme Stars (2001)

'For what is Man in nature? A nothingness in respect to infinity, a whole in respect to nothingness, a median between nothing and everything.'

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669)

'…entropy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it.'

—CS Lewis, God in the Dock (1979)

List of special graphs

Australian adult all-cause mortality rates compared with those in three other countries, 1930-2004:

Australian mortality rates at age 35-69, overall and by either category or selected specific cause, 1952-2004:

313: Australian male mortality at age 35-69 yrs, overall & by mortality category, 1952-2004
312: Australian female mortality at age 35-69 yrs, overall & by mortality category, 1952-2004
311: Australian male mortality at age 35-69 years, overall & by selected cause, 1952-2004
310: Australian male mortality at age 35-69 years, by selected cause, 1952-2004
309: Australian female mortality at age 35-69 years, overall & by selected cause, 1952-2004
308: Australian female mortality at age 35-69 years, by selected cause, 1952-2004

Mortality from cirrhosis and other leading causes of death in early middle age, UK (1950-2007):

307: Male cirrhosis & other mortality in early middle age, UK, 1950-2007
306: Female cirrhosis & other mortality in early middle age, UK, 1950-2007

Overall and selected major mortality rates in England and Wales, Scotland, France, Germany and Sweden (1950-2006):

Age < 1 year

305: Male all-cause mortality at age <1 year, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
304: Female all-cause mortality at age <1 year, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006

Age 1-14 years

303: Male all-cause mortality at age 1-14 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
302: Female all-cause mortality at age 1-14 yrs, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
301: Male cancer mortality at age 1-14 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
300: Female cancer mortality at age 1-14 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006

Age 15-34 years

299: Male all-cause mortality at age 15-34 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
298: Female all-cause mortality at age 15-34 yrs, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
297: Male cancer mortality at age 15-34 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
296: Female cancer mortality at age 15-34 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
295: Male injury mortality at age 15-34 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006
294: Female injury mortality at age 15-34 years, 6 western European nations, 1950-2006

Age 35-69 years

Age 70-79 years

Some key middle-age mortality rates in Hong Kong and Singapore, 1965-2009:

UK mortality rates for major causal categories, 1950-2007:

The causal categories above are the same as the main categories in the Choose a graph section, ie: vascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease, infectious disease, condition arising near start of life, injury, and other cause of death. For descriptions of these categories, see Information about causes of death.

Overall mortality in late middle age for England and Wales since 1890 (and for the United States since 1933):

238: Male all-cause mortality at age 60-69 years in England and Wales, 1890-2006
237: Female all-cause mortality at age 60-69 years in England and Wales, 1890-2006

(These two graphs complement a figure in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology.)

Overall mortality at particular ages in 6 Anglophone nations (Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand, Scotland, United States) since 1930:

Overall mortality at particular ages in different parts of the UK (England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) since 1880:

Overall mortality at particular ages in Belgium since 1841:

212: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in Belgium, 1841-2007
211: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in Belgium, 1841-2007
210: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in Belgium, 1841-2007
209: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in Belgium, 1841-2007
208: All-cause mortality at age 70-79 years in Belgium, 1841-2007
207: All-cause mortality at age 80-89 years in Belgium, 1841-2007

Overall mortality at particular ages in France since 1816:

206: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in France, 1816-2007
205: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in France, 1816-2007
204: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in France, 1816-2007
203: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in France, 1816-2007

Or alternatively, in France since 1900:

202: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in France, 1815-2007
201: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in France, 1815-2007
200: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in France, 1815-2007
199: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in France, 1815-2007
198: All-cause mortality at age 70-79 years in France, 1815-2007
197: All-cause mortality at age 80-89 years in France, 1815-2007

Overall mortality at particular ages in Sweden since 1750:

196: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in Sweden, 1750-2007
195: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in Sweden, 1750-2007
194: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in Sweden, 1750-2007
193: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in Sweden, 1750-2007

Or alternatively, in Sweden since 1860:

192: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in Sweden, 1860-2007
191: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in Sweden, 1860-2007
190: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in Sweden, 1860-2007
189: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in Sweden, 1860-2007
188: All-cause mortality at age 70-79 years in Sweden, 1860-2007
187: All-cause mortality at age 80-89 years in Sweden, 1860-2007

Overall mortality at particular ages in Scotland since 1875:

186: All-cause mortality at age < 1 year in Scotland, 1875-2006
185: All-cause mortality at age 1-14 years in Scotland, 1875-2006
184: All-cause mortality at age 15-34 years in Scotland, 1875-2006
183: All-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in Scotland, 1875-2006
182: All-cause mortality at age 70-79 years in Scotland, 1875-2006
181: All-cause mortality at age 80-89 years in Scotland, 1875-2006

Overall mortality at particular ages in England and Wales since the early and mid-Victorian era:

Below are male middle-age mortality trends in 29 countries for 6 selected diseases that can be caused by smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol. Alcohol can cause liver cirrhosis, smoking can cause lung cancer, and alcohol and smoking can both cause cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx and oesophagus.

Hungarian male lung cancer mortality rates have been among the highest in recorded history (graph 131):

132: Hungarian (& other) female lung cancer mortality at age 35-69 years, 1950-2005
131: Hungarian (& other) male lung cancer mortality at age 35-69 years, 1950-2005
130: Hungarian (& other) female vascular mortality at age 35-69 years, 1950-2005
129: Hungarian (& other) male vascular mortality at age 35-69 years, 1950-2005

Young-adult death rates in New Zealand compared with those in six other countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the US):

The UK heart disease death rate fell by three-quarters between 1975 and 2007:

118: UK coronary heart disease mortality in middle age, 1950-2007

Sweden has low overall mortality rates in middle age, and the male rate is even lower than in Japan:

117: Swedish (& other) female all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2005
116: Swedish (& other) male all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2005

The mid-20th century surge in heart disease deaths in Western countries was especially severe among Finnish men:

115: Finnish (& other) female stroke mortality in middle age, 1950-2005
114: Finnish (& other) male stroke mortality in middle age, 1950-2005
113: Finnish (& other) female ischaemic heart disease mortality in middle age, 1950-2005
112: Finnish (& other) male ischaemic heart disease mortality in middle age, 1950-2005

Iran experienced a huge baby boom in the 1980s, and those born at the peak of the boom will have been aged about 22 in 2009:

111: Population of 4 Middle East countries, children aged < 5 years, 1950-2010

Italy briefly had more people than either France or the UK in the late 1970s, but since then its population has barely changed:

110: Population of France, Italy and the UK, all ages, 1950-2010

Mexico is by far the most populous Spanish-speaking country:

109: Population of 2 Portugese-speaking countries, all ages, 1950-2010
108: Population of 7 Spanish-speaking countries, all ages, 1950-2010
107: Population of 4 English-speaking countries, all ages, 1950-2010
106: Population of 5 English-speaking countries, all ages, 1950-2010

The population of some countries in Oceania:

105: Population of 6 South Pacific countries (not including NZ), all ages, 1950-2010
104: Population of 7 South Pacific countries, all ages, 1950-2010
103: Population of 6 countries in Oceania, all ages, 1950-2010

The population of some countries in Asia:

102: Population of Japan, South Korea and North Korea, all ages, 1950-2010
101: Population of 10 south and south east Asian countries, all ages, 1950-2010
100: Population of 10 central Asian countries, all ages, 1950-2010
99: Population of 5 Persian Gulf countries, all ages, 1950-2010
98: Population of the 10 biggest Middle East countries, all ages, 1950-2010
97: Population of biggest countries in Asia except China & India, all ages, 1950-2010

The population of some countries in Africa:

The population of some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean:

88: Population of biggest countries in South America except Brazil, all ages, 1950-2010
87: Population of the 10 biggest countries in South America, all ages, 1950-2010
86: Population of 7 Caribbean countries, all ages, 1950-2010
85: Population of 7 central American countries (not including Mexico), all ages, 1950-2010
84: Population of 8 central American countries, all ages, 1950-2010
83: Population of the 10 biggest countries in the Americas, all ages, 1950-2010

The population of some countries in Europe:

Demographic turmoil in China and Italy:

70: Population of Italy in 5-year birth cohorts, 1950-2010
69: Population of Africa in 5-year birth cohorts, 1950-2010
68: Population of India in 5-year birth cohorts, 1950-2010
67: Population of China in 5-year birth cohorts, 1950-2010

Three billion-person entities:

66: Population of China, Africa and India, all ages, 1950-2010

The 10 most populous countries of the world in about 2005:

65: Population of the 10 biggest countries, advanced old age, 1950-2010
64: Population of the 10 biggest countries, early old age, 1950-2010
63: Population of the 10 biggest countries, middle-age, 1950-2010
62: Population of the 10 biggest countries, young adulthood, 1950-2010
61: Population of the 10 biggest countries, childhood, 1950-2010
60: Population of the 10 biggest countries, all ages, 1950-2010

The human population of our planet:

59: Population of the world and continents, advanced old age, 1950-2010
58: Population of the world and continents, early old age, 1950-2010
57: Population of the world and continents, middle age, 1950-2010
56: Population of the world and continents, young adulthood, 1950-2010
55: Population of the world and continents, childhood, 1950-2010
54: Population of the world and continents, all ages, 1950-2010

Some measures of the quality of the mortality data in different countries:

53: Proportion of injury deaths where intent undetermined, Mexico etc., 1950s-2000s
52: Proportion of injury deaths where intent undetermined, 10 countries, 1950s-2000s
51: Ill-defined cancer deaths at age 60-69, Mexico & other countries, 1950s-2000s
50: Ill-defined cancer deaths at age 60-69, 10 countries, 1950s-2000s
49: Proportion of vascular deaths not due to CHD or stroke, 11 countries, 1950s-2000s
48: Ill-defined cause of death at age 60-69, Mexico & other countries, 1950s-2000s
47: Ill-defined cause of death at age 60-69, 10 countries, 1950s-2000s

During the second-half of the twentieth century, Danish women and Finnish men had much higher over mortality rates than their peers in similar countries:

46: Nordic female all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2006
45: Nordic male all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2006
44: Danish, Japanese and UK female all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2006
43: Danish, Japanese and UK male all-cause mortality in middle age, 1950-2006

Motor vehicle crash mortality rates at different ages in many countries:

Three animated graphs:

17: UK, US, French & Dutch breast cancer mortality, 35-69 yr, 1952-2005 (animated)
16: UK lung cancer mortality at age 60-69 years, 1952-2007 (animated)
15: UK all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2007 (animated)

Common levels of obesity shorten life expectancy in Western countries by 3 years, but smoking shortens it by 10 years:

14: Effects of obesity on survival in the Prospective Studies Collaboration
13: Effects of smoking on survival in the British Doctors' Study

Mortality attributed to peptic ulcer or stomach cancer in Australia and Japan:

12: Australian peptic ulcer mortality at age 60-69 years, 1952-2003
11: Japanese peptic ulcer mortality at age 60-69 years, 1952-2006
10: Australian stomach cancer mortality at age 50-59 years, 1952-2003
9: Japanese stomach cancer mortality at age 50-59 years, 1952-2006

Male lung cancer mortality in the UK used to be among the highest in the world, but the improvement since then has been among the best:

8: UK lung cancer mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2007

Spectacular reductions in New Zealand heart disease and stroke deaths—and even more spectacular reductions in Australia:

7: Australian & NZ female stroke mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2003
6: Australian & NZ male stroke mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2003
5: Australian & NZ female CHD mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2003
4: Australian & NZ male CHD mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2003

Middle-age death rates in the UK are now appreciably lower than in the US, and the gap is widening:

3: US & UK female all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2005
2: US & UK male all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2005

UK death rates in middle age are falling fast for women, and even faster for men:

1: UK all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years, 1952-2006