UK death rates in women "third worst in western Europe"

A worldwide analysis of death rates in men and women aged 15 to 59 has shown that UK women have the third highest mortality in Western Europe, being beaten in the European "death league" by just plucky little Belgium and the pastry obsessed Danes.

The study ranks countries by estimating the chance that a 15 year old will die before they reach sixty, expressed as the number of deaths per thousand. For UK women this is put at 58 - i.e. for every 1,000 15-year-old females in the UK, 942 of them should still be alive in 45 years time.

In fact the UK is ranked with former Communist countries Albania and Slovenia for female death rates.

By comparison, UK males are languishing in mid-table obscurity, with a rate of 93 per 1,000 - although a higher rate than for women, it is lower than for many other Western European countries such as Portugal, France and Denmark.

The good news is that these death rates have been declining for the last 40 years, from 107 deaths per thousand for women in 1970 and 180 for men in the same year.

Globally speaking, if you want to increase your chances of living longer then, if you are a woman, the best places to be are Cyprus, South Korea, Japan, Greece, and Italy, and for men it is Iceland, Sweden, Malta, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Generally death rates are in decline across the world. The HIV epidemic and the collapse of Communism both contributed to rises in death rates in Africa and eastern Europe but these trends have now generally been reversed, but in some cases death rates are higher today than they were 40 years ago.

The study was written by Dr Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and is published in the medical journal Lancet.

This article was published on Fri 30 April 2010