OBJECTIVE: To determine relative impact of genetic, common-litter, and within-litter factors on puppy mortality. ANIMALS: 2,622 Boxer puppies of 413 litters born during a 14-month period. PROCEDURE: For each puppy, pedigree was determined, and litter in which it was born was registered. Overall mortality and mortality per specific cause of ...

OBJECTIVES: The implementation of the Fetal and Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) process was examined as part of the evaluation of the national Healthy Start program, a federal program designed to reduce infant mortality in several communities. The implementation of the FIMR process over the 5-year funding period is described in ...

BACKGROUND: Bolus fibrinolytic therapy facilitates early efficient institution of reperfusion therapy. Tenecteplase is a genetically engineered variant of alteplase with slower plasma clearance, better fibrin specificity, and high resistance to plasminogen-activator inhibitor-1. We did a double-blind, randomised, controlled trial to assess the efficacy and safety of tenecteplase compared with alteplase. ...

This paper confronts a major problem in relation to the metropolitan and urban mortality declines in Britain during the later nineteenth century: the extent to which cause-specific death rates at district level were distorted by an official failure to redistribute deaths occurring in institutions back to "normal" place of residence. ...

OBJECTIVE: To describe, evaluate, and suggest interpretations for an observed aggregate-level relation between trends in mortality from cirrhosis and per capita consumption of distilled spirits in the United States. DESIGN: Trend analysis using data on US cirrhosis mortality and per capita alcohol consumption. RESULTS: There is a consistent long-term trend ...

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of material deprivation on the winter rise in mortality and temperature dependent variations in mortality. DESIGN: Ecological comparison of seasonal mortality at electoral ward level. Main outcome measures were ratios of winter to rest of the year mortality rates (seasonality ratios) and monthly deaths as ...

We apply multilevel methods to data from Mexico to examine how village migration patterns affect infant survival outcomes in origins. We argue that migration is a cumulative process with varying health effects at different stages of its progression, and test several related hypotheses. Findings suggest higher rates of infant mortality ...

Religion has acted as a brake on demographic transition in a number of historical and contemporary populations. In a study in two rural areas of Zimbabwe, we found substantial differences in recent demographic trends between Mission and Independent or "Spirit-type" churches. Birth rates are higher in some Spirit-type churches and, ...

High mortality during the first part of the laying period was observed in Norwegian White Leghorns during the period 1988-1992. A longitudinal field study with repeated measurement of cumulative mortality was undertaken in the period from January 1994 to January 1996 to investigate (1) the mortality and susceptibility to Marek's ...

A dead elk (Cervus elaphus roosevelti) calf was diagnosed with bacillary hemoglobinuria, a toxemia caused by the bacterium Clostridium haemolyticum. The mortality occurred in southwest Washington, USA (46 degrees 13'N, 123 degrees 22'W), in an area in which several previous mortalities, suspected but not conclusively diagnosed to be either bacillary ...

A computerised database containing information on over 17.8 million salmon contained within 49 separate marine populations was used to study the epidemiology of pancreas disease (PD) in Ireland. Of the 43 recorded PD outbreaks, 57% occurred in the 3 mo period August to October inclusive (17 to 32 wk post-transfer). ...

Objectives: To examine trends in mortality among babies registered solely by their mother (lone mothers) and to compare these with trends in infant mortality for couple registrations overall and couple registrations subdivided by social class of father. Design: Analysis of trends in infant death rates from 1975 to 1996 for ...

BACKGROUND: Variations in 'avoidable' mortality may reflect variations in the quality of care, but they may also be due to variations in incidence or severity of diseases. We studied the association between regional variations in 'avoidable' mortality and variations in disease incidence. For a selection of conditions we also analysed ...

Historic air pollution episodes of the 1950s led to acute increases in infant mortality, and some recent epidemiologic studies suggest that infant or child mortality may still result from air pollution at current levels. To investigate the evidence for such an association, we conducted a time-series study of infant mortality ...

OBJECTIVE: It has been speculated that environmental factors play a role in the etiology of ulcerative colitis. A previous analysis revealed that the time trends of ulcerative colitis in England were shaped by an underlying birth-cohort pattern. We undertook this study to test whether the birth-cohort pattern was a unique ...

Log-linear Poisson mixed models were used to study provincial malignant brain tumour (MBT) mortality among children and adolescents in Spain (1975-1992) in order to investigate the influence of specific socio-economic factors and to produce smoothed estimators of standardised mortality ratios (SMRs). Interdependence between geographical units was taken into account by ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine patterns of mortality for specific causes of death with increases in the Texaco mortality study to determine if the patterns are related to employment in the petroleum industry. METHODS: Mortality patterns by duration of employment in various job groups were examined for mesothelioma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, ...

AIM: To compare mortality and respiratory morbidity in preterm infants born at 4 United Kingdom centers during 1994 and 1995. METHOD: Collection of CRIB scores, respiratory parameters and mortality rates from unit databases. RESULTS: Mortality in center A was 27% (actual number of deaths 36/135), in center B was 30% ...

Wyoming toads (Bufo baxteri) that died from January 1989 to June 1996 were submitted to the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory (Laramie, Wyoming, USA) for postmortem evaluation. These consisted of 108 free-ranging toads and 170 animals from six captive populations. Ninety-seven (90%) of 108 free-ranging toad carcasses were submitted during September ...

This study investigated whether two widely publicized cases of deaths facilitated by physicians were followed by significant peaks in mortality. In March, 1991, Timothy Quill, MD, published a controversial editorial describing the physician-assisted suicide (PAS) of his 45-year-old, female leukemia patient. In a landmark decision in December 1990, the Missouri ...

In answer to a reader's question, this column affirms that Lamaze preparation for birth is important and valuable.

This article explores the connections between infant mortality, eugenic thinking, and the professional development of pediatricians and pediatric nurses in the early twentieth century. It argues that the goal of the physicians affiliated with Germany's National Hospital to Combat Infant Mortality was to create and disseminate a centrally-controlled message about ...

++Epidemiologic studies have focused attention on the health effects of fine particulate air pollutants <2.5 microm in diameter (PM2.5). To further characterize the potential effects of fine particles, we investigated the relationship of air pollution to mortality in Mexico City during 1993-1995. The concentration of PM2.5 was measured on a ...

OBJECTIVES: This study estimated the effects of changes in unemployment rates of occupation groups on changes in mortality in a period of increasing unemployment. METHODS: Census records for all 20- to 64-year-old economically active Finnish men in 1985 were linked to information on unemployment and deaths in 1987 through 1993. ...

Biological anthropologists are interested in a population's early mortality rates for a variety of reasons. Early mortality (infant or juvenile) is of obvious importance to those interested in demography, but early mortality statistics are useful for life history analysis, paleodemography, and human adaptability studies, among others. In general, the form ...

"This paper examines how neonatal mortality has changed in the Czech Republic during the [1990s], examining trends in the distribution of birth weights and in birth weight specific neonatal mortality. It examines how these have varied in different parts of the country and, to ascertain the scope for further improvement, ...

"In this paper we examine the relationship between premature mortality and material deprivation both over time (the intercensal period, 1981-91) and over space (for the population in wards and ward groups in Wales). Our focus is on the methods of analysis for small area...multiple cross-section mortality data and their application ...

Above-average exposure to electromagnetic fields has been associated with certain nonmalignant medical conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, other neurologic diseases, depressive symptoms, and suicide. The authors conducted a nationwide mortality study in Denmark of 21,236 men employed in utility companies between 1900 and 1993. The causes of death were ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact on mortality of the heatwave in England and Wales during July and August 1995 and to describe any difference in mortality impact between the Greater London urban population and the national population. DESIGN: Analysis of variation in daily mortality in England and Wales and ...

This article presents an analysis of the levels, trends and determinants of infant mortality in various regions of Finland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Nursing habits were of critical importance as were diet and hygiene. It is suggested that there were differences in the frequency of breastfeeding ...

Little is known about past and present mortality in Vietnam, as the first official data on mortality have only recently become available from censuses taken in 1979 and 1989. Using these data, I estimate Vietnamese mortality during the intercensal period using two techniques that rely on age-specific growth rates from ...

Old noninbred fly mortality decreases according to the inverse linear law and reduces to a single suborder-specific age. Relative child mortality (the mortality at a given age related to the mortality at 10 years) from 1 mo to 11 years is the same with 8% mean accuracy for all humans, ...

An outbreak of rabbit viral hemorrhagic disease (RVHD) and of myxomatosis occurred in a free-living population of rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) near Paris (France) in 1995. Annual mortality rates were 88% in adults and 99% in juveniles. There was no difference in mortality rates between males and females. Since most adults ...

Effects of the distribution in space of permethrin (insecticide)-impregnated bed nets (IIBNS) on child mortality were studied in a randomized controlled trial of IIBNs in a an area highly endemic for Plasmodium falciparum malaria in rural northern Ghana. Eight hundred sixty-two deaths occurred among children 6-59 months of age during ...

OBJECTIVES: This study examined associations between income inequality and mortality in 282 US metropolitan areas. METHODS: Income inequality measures were calculated from the 1990 US Census. Mortality was calculated from National Center for Health Statistics data and modeled with weighted linear regressions of the log age-adjusted rate. RESULTS: Excess mortality ...

Two recent US cohort studies suggest that current levels of particulate pollution in urban air are associated not only with short-term, but also with long-term increases in cardiorespiratory morbidity and mortality. The aim of the present analyses was to evaluate the change in life expectancy assuming the long-term increase in ...

This paper reviews trends in rural/urban under-5 mortality differentials in Sub-Saharan Africa in historical perspective, with particular attention to the case of Kenya. The rural/urban mortality gap has narrowed within the last half-century, but while this was largely due to rapidly falling rural infant and childhood mortality over most of ...

During the past two decades, scholars have attempted to quanify the mortality at sea of a large number of seaborne populations. We now have estimates of death rates associated with over 13,000 voyages between 1497 and the First World War. These include voyages of Portuguese and Dutch travellers to Asian ...

This community based study was undertaken to determine the infant and child mortality rates, causes of childhood mortality and examine the utilization patterns of health services in north Gondar Administrative Zone. The study was conducted from November 1994 to May 1995. A pretested questionnaire based on criteria suggested for diagnosis ...

This review describes the Australian decline in all-cause mortality, 1788-1990, and compares this with declines in Europe and North America. The period until the 1870s shows characteristic 'crisis mortality', attributable to epidemics of infectious disease. A decline in overall mortality is evident from 1880. A precipitous fall occurs in infant ...

Antimicrobial prophylaxis against gram-positive bacteremia (GPB) following BMT may prevent infections but promote antimicrobial resistance. In a sequential cohort study involving 289 consecutive BMT recipients we compared three protocols for prevention of GPB (vancomycin prophylaxis, penicillin/cefazolin prophylaxis, and no specific GPB prophylaxis) with respect to incidence of GPB, mortality, and ...

Over a 6-month period, the mean mortality risk (based on 393 operations participating in the United States National Animal Health Monitoring System 1995 National Swine Study, and representing operations with > or = 300 market hogs in 16 states), was 2.3 +/- 0.2% in the grower/finisher production phase (where figures ...

Reducing infant mortality in the United States is a national priority. States' infant mortality rates vary substantially. Public health researchers, practitioners, and leaders have long argued that social and other structural factors must be addressed if health outcomes are to be improved. A knowledge of which structural variables are most ...

It is well known that men and women who are married have lower mortality rates than those who are not. It is also known that some migrants from abroad have higher mortality rates than people in England and Wales and that they have different patterns of family formation and dissolution. ...

Hereditary cerebral haemorrhage with amyloidosis--Dutch type (HCHWA-D) is an autosomal dominant disorder, caused by a single base mutation in the amyloid beta precursor protein (beta PP) gene located on chromosome 21, resulting in recurrent haemorrhagic strokes and dementia. Though HCHWA-D is caused by a dominant mutation, the phenotypic expression varies ...

BACKGROUND: This paper presents a structured review of the published information on the mortality of schizophrenia. METHOD: A meta-analysis of the literature. RESULTS: Schizophrenia has a significantly increased mortality from natural and unnatural causes. Twenty-eight percent of the excess mortality is attributable to suicide and 12% to accidents. The rest ...

We report diarrhoea mortality rates in the city of Aracaju, Brazil from 1992 to 1994 when there were 318 deaths due to diarrhoea. Eighty-nine per cent of deaths occurred in infants: 53.1% were boys and 78.9% died in hospital. Diarrhoea mortality rates for children under 5 years of age were ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To identify the time courses and magnitude of ischaemic heart (IHD), respiratory (RES), and all cause mortality associated with common 20-30 day patterns of cold weather in order to assess links between cold exposure and mortality. DESIGN: Daily temperatures and daily mortality on successive days before and after ...

For over a century, actuaries and biologists working independently of each other have presented arguments for why total mortality needs to be partitioned into biologically meaningful subcomponents. These mortality partitions tended to overlook genetic diseases that are inherited because the partitions were motivated by a paradigm focused on aging. In ...

The results of several studies have indicated significant associations between daily mortality and air pollution, with little evidence of a threshold. In the current study, the authors examined daily mortality during the period 1987-1993 for the Brisbane region, which is the fastest-growing urban region in Australia (annual average concentration of ...