Death Rates

The rate of prisoners dying of AIDS dropped by more than half from 1995 to 1997, the Justice Department said. The report on 1997 data found that 48 of every 100,000 prisoners died of AIDS, down from a all-time high of 100 per 100,000 two years earlier. The actual number of inmate deaths in 1997 caused by AIDS dropped to 538, down from 907 in 1996. Cases of HIV also fell: There were 23,548 HIV-infected inmates at the end of 1997, 333 fewer than in 1996.

Middle-age black men are dying at nearly twice the rate of white men of a similar age, reflecting lower incomes and poorer access to health care, a study says. But mortality among black infants is dropping. Although overall longevity for blacks and whites has improved during the last 40 years, the gap between the races has narrowed little, former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher said in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs.

Death rates from cancer continue to fall in the U.S., dropping more than 2% a year from 2002 through 2004, cancer experts are reporting today. There were sizable declines in deaths from lung, prostate and colorectal cancer in men, and from breast and colon cancer among women. Lung cancer deaths still rose among women, but the increase slowed.

Death rates associated with heart bypass operations, gallbladder removals and three other common surgeries varied tremendously among California hospitals in 1985, according to a Times analysis of data covering nearly all patients hospitalized in the state. At seven hospitals, more than 1 in 10 bypass surgery patients died after the operation, compared to the statewide average of fewer than one in 20.

Banking away from the freeways toward the seashore, Laguna Canyon Road fairly sings of the beauty, escape and fun ahead. It skims past a shallow lagoon, then sweeps by towering eucalyptus trees and cattle grazing on hillsides. The road spills out onto Coast Highway and Main Beach, where on a warm fall day the carefree and the bronzed play volleyball and bask in the sunshine.

Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles had the highest standardized death rate for newborn babies of all California hospitals in 1986, according to a sophisticated analysis of perinatal death-rate data by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, which is being made public today. King and three other Southern California hospitals with more than 600 deliveries had significantly higher-than-expected perinatal death rates when compared to the statewide average, the report said.

In a sweeping disclosure of previously confidential data, the private watchdog group that monitors the Medicare program in California released Friday the death rates from common diseases for Medicare patients at each of the state's hospitals.

The U.S. death rates from heart disease and stroke are falling sharply, but researchers are not sure why, an American Heart Assn. study released Sunday shows. Heart and blood vessel diseases remain the nation's No. 1 killer, but the study showed that from 1979 to 1989 the death rate from heart attack in the United States declined 30% and the death rate from stroke fell 31.5%. Researchers said they are not sure why there has been such a marked improvement. Dr.

Thirty-one of the California hospitals with more than 250 Medicare patients in 1987 had higher-than-predicted mortality rates, and 10 had low overall values, according to a federal report released Thursday. In what the government called "another significant step forward" in improving health care, the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration released its second annual report on death rates for Medicare patients at the nation's hospitals.

A woman entering a hospital after suffering a heart attack is 43.8% more likely to die before leaving than a man admitted with the same condition, according to a study released Monday. "The idea is that we found a substantial difference in death rates for women in hospitals as compared to men," said Dr. Philip Greenland of the University of Rochester School of Medicine.