Abstract
PART I, consisting of Tables (Medical), of the Registrar-General's Statistical Review of 1934 has just been published (London: H.M. Stationery Office. 65. net). The number of live births in England and Wales registered in the year was 597,642, giving a birth-rate of 14.8 per 1,000 persons living. This rate was 0.4 above that for 1933, which was the lowest ever recorded. The death-rate was 11.8 per 1,000 persons living, 0-5 below the rate for 1933. When allowance is made for the fact that the average age of the living population is increasing every year, the resulting corrected or standardised death-rate was the lowest ever recorded both for men and for women, the rate for the sexes together being just half of the corresponding rate in 1881-90. Mortality from infectious and parasitic diseases in general reached a low record of 1.3 per 1,000, notwithstanding increases for scarlet fever and diphtheria, and the tuberculosis rate declined once again to a new low record of 763 per million. Pneumonia gave the lowest rate save in 1930, which was also a very healthy year. The cancer rate, corrected for the increasing age of the population, rose slightly to 1,003 per million, but was still below the levels reached in 1928 and 1929. A new feature of the review is the tabulation of a ‘comparability factor’ for each separate town and rural district, which shows at a glance whether the distribution of persons by age and sex in the population of that area would lead to the expectation of a death rate above or below that of the country as a whole, and makes it possible to correct the death rate by a simple multiplication for valid comparison with that of any other area similarly corrected. After correcting in this way, the administrative County of London and the south eastern counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Berkshire gave a combined mortality rate after correction only 84 per cent of that of the country as a whole, compared with 113 per cent for the north of England, namely, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire.
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Births and Deaths in England and Wales, 1934. Nature 136, 713–714 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136713b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136713b0