Death Rates

A record number of fatal traffic incidents and a double-digit spike in shooting deaths led to one of the deadliest years for law enforcement officers in more than a decade. With the exception of 2001, which saw a dramatic increase in deaths because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, 2007 was the deadliest year for law enforcement since 1989, according to preliminary data released jointly by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and Concerns of Police Survivors.

In what the government termed a major step forward in assuring quality health care, the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration on Thursday released comprehensive information on death rates for Medicare patients at most of the nation's hospitals. The statistics reveal which hospitals have unusually high or low overall death rates, as well as high or low death rates for common causes of death in the elderly and disabled, such as heart diseases, lung diseases and strokes.

For the first time since the government began keeping national death statistics in 1930, the number of cancer deaths in the United States has fallen as improvements in diagnosis, therapy and prevention have finally overtaken increases caused by aging and population growth. The number of deaths declined by only a sliver -- 369 out of about 557,000 between 2002 and 2003, the latest years for which data are available.

The head of the California Highway Patrol on Monday called for a department-wide emergency review of safety policies after the on-the-job deaths of six officers in the last five months -- the most recent struck and killed over the weekend by a suspected drunk driver in the Cajon Pass.

Driven by an unusually mild flu season, annual deaths in the U.S. fell by 50,000 in 2004, the largest drop in more than 60 years, federal officials said Wednesday. The decrease was a fraction of the 2.4 million total deaths in 2004, but it helped push the nation's death rate to a record low of 801 per 100,000 people.

About 4 million babies die within a month of their birth -- about half of those in the first 24 hours, according to a global report on newborn mortality. Simple measures like knit caps to keep babies warm could help save many lives, said U.S.-based Save the Children. Half a million women in undeveloped countries die annually from complications in pregnancy or birth, the report says. It includes data from separate nations, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Re "Transplant Inequality: Death by Geography," June 11 The Times' presentation of the geographic imbalances that persist in transplantation illustrates nicely the challenges in seeking a balance of equity, geography and medicine. One geographic factor that merits consideration is that death rates, which are a crude but correlated predictor of potential donors, vary significantly across the country, with California's being 6.7 per thousand while Florida's is 10. Pulsatile perfusion can extend kidney storage time to 48 hours or longer following organ recovery and allow national allocation of perfect-match kidneys.

At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies -- a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.

The Indonesian Ministry of Health confirmed Thursday the country's 42nd human death from avian influenza, a toll that gave the nation, along with Vietnam, the most deaths from the virus. The latest victim, a 44-year-old man from East Jakarta, died July 12, the World Health Organization said. The man was probably infected by poultry around his home or the wet market where he worked at a food stall, the organization said. The strain of bird flu known as H5N1 is still primarily an animal disease.

As the federal government prepares to take action against underperforming transplant centers, new data released this month show no improvement in the number of programs that fail to meet Medicare survival standards. Eleven of the 234 federally funded liver, heart and lung programs had one-year survival rates that fell below the benchmarks established by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to the latest data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.