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.