MORTALITY TRENDS

• Trends in national mortality rates •  

Graphs showing time trends in mortality rates

Welcome...

This website shows time trends in mortality rates. The rates are for particular countries, ages and causes of death—and you can choose which. To begin, click one of the images at right.

Countries

Full sets of graphs are available for 40 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, France, Spain, Singapore and Italy.

Mortality rates

Most mortality rates were calculated using data from the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO is not, however, responsible for any of this site's content.

Suggestions

Enquiries and suggestions can be emailed to: info@mortality-trends.org

Permissions

If you would like to copy some of the graphs on this website, please read this.

Chronology

A new section which will follow soon.

'Individual life varies in duration from a second to a century.'

  —William Farr, Letter to the Registrar General (1875)

                           

Click on one of the images below:

Choose a graph

Choose a country, cause of
death and age range

Choose a graph showing time trends in a mortality rate

Random graph

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random graph

Randomly select a graph showing national mortality trends

Special graph

Animated and other
selected graphs

Show the current featured graph of national mortality trends

Twitter feed

Live feed for
@mortrends

Choose a graph showing WHO mortality trends

What's New

Web address: www.mortality-trends.org

(also www.mortrends.org)

21 May 2013. Graphs for the United States have been updated to 2010, and those for Canada, which still go up to 2009, have been modified slightly to take account of revisions to the underlying WHO data.

20 May 2013. On the Choose a Graph page, the New Zealand graphs have been updated from 2008 to 2009, and the Australian graphs from 2004 to (remarkably) 2011. However, Australia still has no mortality information for 2005, and that for 2006 is of uncertain quality, so each Australian graph has a gap from 2005 to 2008 (note that the plotted rates are 3-year rolling averages).

9 December 2012. This website is now linked to Twitter: see @mortrends.

2 October 2012. Fourteen graphs showing Australian adult mortality trends up to 2004 have been added to the Special Graph page. (More recent information on Australia—without time-series gaps—is not available.) Around 1970, a sudden downward acceleration in overall mortality for middle-aged and elderly people began (in most cases, precisely in the year 1971), at exactly the same time that coronary heart disease mortality rates, having peaked a few years earlier, began to decline precipitously. The reductions in overall mortality were so steep and persistent over the ensuing three decades that, by 2004, Australia had the second lowest rate for middle-aged men worldwide, and the sixth lowest rate for middle-aged women.

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

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