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8
although it has since followed a downward trend there has been in no year an
improvement comparable with that between the years 1942 and 1943.
Mortality

* Based on the dual classification of deaths for England and Wales, 1939.
The second cause affecting the statistics was the outbreak of war. The young
and healthy section of the population was, from September, 1939, excluded from the
mortality statistics, which henceforth related only to civilians. This selective factor
was bound to inflate the death-rates, since the population in respect of which they
were calculated was now on the average older and less healthy.
To reduce the confusing effect of the large scale reclassification of deaths, heart
diseases and bronchitis have been combined.
The death-rate from all causes, which, with the increasing age of the population,
had been slowly rising before the war, again rose sharply in 1940. This increase
was partly due to the war-time statistical basis as explained above, but the heavy
toll of air raids was an important contributory factor. Between 1944 and 1950
there was, however, a decline in trend. The rate of 12.6 in 1951 is appreciably
higher than that of the previous year (11.3) due to increasing number of deaths from
cancer, heart disease and respiratory diseases, resulting from the gradual ageing of
the population, and to the influenza epidemic.
Bronchitis
and heart
disease
The death-rate for the bronchitic and heart disease group which was 5.01 in
1951 compared with 4.32 in 1950 has followed a similar trend to that of the rate for
" all causes " of which it forms a large part. Figures for the component diseases are
shown in Table 3 (page 142).
Cerebral
haemorrhage
The death-rate from vascular lesions of the nervous system in 1951 was 1.22 per
1,000, compared with 1.11 in 1950. The average for 1941-45 was 1.15, but a