MORTALITY TRENDS

• Trends in national mortality rates •  

Graphs showing time trends in mortality rates

Female all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in six

Anglophone nations: 1930-2003

Graph showing all-cause mortality at age 35-69 years in Anglophone nations, since 1930

Comment: The New Zealand data are for non-Maori only because data for the whole country (ie, also including Maori) do not become available until 1948. The Australian data do not include Aboriginals until 1966, the year in which they were first included in the country's vital statistics.

Method: Mortality rates were downloaded from the Human Mortality Database (see www.mortality.org or www.humanmortality.de) on 4 December 2009. The mortality rates have been smoothed, as three-year moving averages (see the Info page for details), to enable comparisons of several nations on one graph. The smoothing causes transient deviations from the general trend to be understated, though the area under the curve remains the same.

WHO mortality rates for particular countries, ages and causes of death