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The paper compares three different models that have been developed in the literature for modeling and forecasting human mortality rates over the age range. The first model is the quadratic Gompertz model where the quadratic line is fitted for age and sex. The second is the one-dimensional Spline model, which fits linear combinations of the Basis Splines. The last model is the Lee-Carter model which is used to fit each sex to a set of age-specific death rates by fitting Poisson log-bilinear regression model in generalized linear models (GLM). A time-varying index of mortality is then forecasted using a time series linear forecasting model autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). These forecasts are used to generate projected age-specific mortality rates in Kuwait for ages 55 to 90 for the period 2006-2015, based on the mortality data for years 1993-2005 for males and females separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus is life-threatening for some patients. Analysis of virus genome sequences has provided biomedical scientists new insight in understanding host-virus interaction. We have addressed the questions if HA protein is in related to virulence of viruses. To test the hypothesis, we have focuses our analysis on the protein of hemagglutinant (HA), a protein , from the virus isolated three regions with similar living standard, popuin HongKong (death rate: 2.57 per million), Taiwan (death rate: 0.74 per million) and Japan (death rate: 0.14 per million). Our results suggest that in the human population, the virus H1N1 have isolated several time both in Taiwan and Japan, as early as in 2002 and with a dominant occurrence in 2009. However, through phylogenetic analysis, the The recent outbreak of H1N1 has different sequence origin than the previous ones. And, between the years of 2002-2008, the dominant virus stain is H3N2. The results suggest that the general population in Taiwan might not have the immunity against the new virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World," by Gregory Clark is presented. It offers a Malthusian model to explain how the pre-industrial economy functioned before 1800. The model assumes that each society has a birth rate, determined by customs regulating fertility, but increasing with material living standards, the death rate in each society declines as living standards increase, and that material living standards decline as population increases.

Chapter 5 of the book "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World," by Gregory Clark is presented. It attempts to address the issue on whether pre-industrial mortality was a declining function of income as assumed in the Malthusian model. It also aims to explain the role of differences in mortality rates at a given income level in explaining income differences across societies before 1800.

Chapter 1 of the book "AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis--Yet," is presented. It explores the socio-political impact of the African AIDS epidemic world over. Information is given that it has increased the mortality levels of adults in their prime, 20-40 years. However, it is stated that the governments world over are not threatened by accusations of mishandling the epidemic. Predictions are that about one sixth of all the people in Africa will contact HIV in their lifetime.

Chapter 1 of the book "World Health Statistics 2005" is presented. It explores the rationale use of life expectancy at birth and health life expectancy. It highlights the percentage rate of adult mortality, under-5 mortality and neonatal mortality in 1,000 population. It also investigates the causes of such mortality rate including that of maternal mortality rate. Prevalence of HIV among the population aged 15 to 49 years is also discussed.

The French distinguish themselves by thinking they are universal. In early January 2002, Jean-Marie Messier, head of the water-distribution-to-mobile-phones conglomerate Vivendi Universal, announced in a resounding interview the end of l'exception française. The furore which then arose from virtually every corner of politics and the media revealed the deep-rooted belief that France had remained, and should remain for the foreseeable future, a society different from its neighbours and partners. Different parties attach different meanings to this claim but all amount to a call to the government to set standards for society at large and enforce them. What Messier may have been voicing, however, was not so much a normative judgement as a statement of fact, pointing out the relentless erosion of cultural identities in the Western world and beyond. In this he was undoubtedly right. This process of convergence and standardisation, often referred to as ‘Americanisation’, in many aspects of social life, economic and otherwise, has affected France as it has its European neighbours, with increasing vigour in the second half of the century. The end of Malthusianism Convergence has affected first and foremost French patterns of demographic behaviour. The first Western nation historically to have undergone a demographic transition (a drastic reduction of its birth rate), France saw its population virtually stagnate for close to a hundred years from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. In 1936 it numbered thirty-nine million people, barely more than in 1836 (thirty-six million). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the World Health Organization, United Nations Children's Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund have developed an approach to estimate maternal mortality for 2000. For this study, the country with the highest estimated number of maternal deaths is India, with 136,000. These estimates were carried out to draw attention to the existence and likely dimensions of the problem of maternal mortality around the world.

Chapter 29 of the book "Health Systems Performance Assessment" is presented. It presents the development and testing of a new model life table system based on a modification of the Brass logit life table system. It reviews the main two-parameter model life table systems, emphasizing the Coale-Demeny, United Nations and Brass systems. It also presents the logic and mathematical foundation for a modification of the Brass logit life table system.

Chapter 28 of the book "Health Systems Performance Assessment" is presented. It provides details on the methods and data sources used to prepare annual life tables made by the World Health Organization (WHO) for all Member States. It provides a brief review of the two main approaches used by WHO to estimate the parameters of the Brass logit system for each country. A discussion of how the basic demographic inputs for the method were estimated for countries is presented, as well as a summary of the major findings.

Chapter 4 of the book "The Burden of Musculoskeletal Conditions at the Start of the New Millennium" is presented. It discusses the various characteristics of disease severity and offers a model to describe the course of each musculoskeletal condition. It states the mortality rates among hip fracture patients in developed countries. It explains the mean treatment cost per injury in Ghana.

ABSTRACT The relationship between the longevity, health, and welfare of modern populations is difficult to assess, but all the complexities are multiplied when our evaluation must rely heavily on skeletal data from the remote past. This chapter uses skeletal data for several groups of Native American Indians who lived on the Great Plains of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to reconstruct their welfare history during the long process of contact with Europeans. The estimation of mortality involves putting the mean age-at-death for each group back into the relevant environmental, historical, and demographic contexts necessary to interpret that statistic as a true life expectancy. Subsequently, the growth-ratesensitive life expectancy estimaters are integrated with various dimensions of skeletal health to compare the relative welfare of the settled horticultural groups with equestrian nomads. WELFARE HISTORY AND MORTALITY Welfare history involves comparing different groups living in different times and places, and how they fared with respect to each other and ourselves (Steckel, 1995). Hunter-gatherers have been described as leading lives that were nasty, brutish, and short compared to our own, or healthier and better, albeit simpler. The invention of agriculture can be seen as a defensive response to climatic change, one that meant having to do more work for less food, or, alternatively, a fortunate innovation that raised material standards of living and life expectancy for all subsequent generations (Cohen and Armelegos, 1984; Cohen, 1989). “Civilization” may have improved or reduced the health and welfare of women and so on (Coatsworth, 1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book began by extolling the benefits of studying very long-term trends in health using evidence from skeletal remains. To this end, we coordinated the preparation of the largest comparable database ever assembled in the field of bioarchaeology, which consists of observations on 12,520 individuals who lived over the past several millennia at 65 composite sites in the Western Hemisphere. The database is available to the public and includes seven commonly measured, basic indicators of health: stature inferred from long bone lengths; evidence of anemia from porotic hyperostosis or cribra orbitalia; linear enamel hypoplasias; trauma; infectious lesions on bones; dental health; and degenerative joint disease. The first three indicators reflect the health quality of life in childhood, while the last two are connected with the degenerative processes of aging and hard work. Trauma and infectious lesions can occur at any age but are more common among older children and adults. Our conclusions first highlight methodological contributions, beginning with a technique for measuring health based on two essential ingredients: health quality of life while living and length of life. The Mark I version of the health index, which roughly gauges chronic conditions of the first component, is based on the prevalence and severity of the basic health indicators. We tabulated separate indexes for each attribute and weighted them equally in calculating the overall index. Attributes for individual observations were scored from 0 (worst outcome) to 100 (no evidence of pathology), and the results at each site were converted to age-specific rates, which were weighted by the distribution of person-years lived by age in a reference population (Model West, level 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Data were collected from254 skeletons at the Monroe County Almshouse in Rochester, NewYork, dating from1826–1863.Additional evidence was used to calculate mortality rates for paupers (Brighton Town Clerk's Records) and the general population of the City of Rochester (Mount Hope records and census data). Because death rates were so high at the almshouse, the signs of biological stress observed in the skeletons, with the possible exception of infants, were probably not the result of institutionalization but, rather, the result of nutritional inadequacies or diseases experienced outside the almshouse. Documentary evidence indicates that mortality in the City of Rochester around the middle of the nineteenth century was highly variable and characterized by considerable infectious and parasitic diseases. Infant and early childhood mortality was severe. At the Monroe County Almshouse almost one-half of the subadults (as evidenced in both the skeletal collection and the BTC Record) died within the first year of life. The health index for the sample is 72.3% of the possible maximum score, which is higher than that for the St. Thomas' Anglican Church sample. Documentary evidence, when available, should be included in the overall assessment of health among skeletal samples. It is evident from the Brighton Town Clerk's record that acute infectious disease played a major role in the mortality experience of almshouse residents, a situation that was not incorporated into the Mark I version of the index. In some respects, inmates of the almshouse do not appear much different from the population in general, for example, with respect to the stature of adult males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The economic record establishes the midnineteenth century as a time of prosperity according to growth in incomes, wealth per capita, and technology. Less is known about the record on health, and that which is available suggests that improvements in the quality of life did not extend to mortality rates and morbidity levels. The population investigated here consists of almost 600 skeletons out of more than 1,500 individuals buried at St. Thomas' Anglican Church cemetery in Belleville, Ontario, between 1821 and 1874. Our investigations show that mortality rates, especially for infants, did not improve over the period of greatest cemetery use, from 1850 to 1874. Skeletal investigations support the interpretation of the importance of acute versus chronic infections and the significance of environmental conditions affecting infant morbidity and mortality. The skeletal variables identified as significant contributors to the quality of life index for St. Thomas' may fit with the conclusion that healthwise, life in the mid-nineteenth century was not measurably better for the middle to upper class at St. Thomas' and may coincidentally reflect a broader North American phenomenon related to urbanization. Nevertheless, these observations are also uniquely reflective of the church and town alone. INTRODUCTION Historians and other social scientists have been interested in the fate of various classes or socioeconomic groups during the transition from a settled agricultural to an urban-industrial way of life, a change that occurred in North America during the middle of the nineteenth century. The economic record clearly establishes the midnineteenth century as a time of prosperity according to growth in incomes, wealth per capita, and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 9 of the book "National Control Programmes: Policies and Managerial Guidelines" is presented. It explores cancer surveillance as the basis for cancer control planning, monitoring and evaluation. It highlights several statistics for assessing the burden of cancer including the measurement of incidence, mortality, and prevalence. Details about population-based cancer registry and the stepwise approach of the World Trade Organization for measuring key risk factors are offered.

Chapter 8 of the book "National Control Programmes: Policies and Managerial Guidelines" is presented. It explores the significance of cancer control research to identify and evaluate the means of reducing cancer morbidity and mortality, and discusses the phases of cancer control research. It highlights several major areas of research for cancer including laboratory research, epidemiology and clinical trials, and explains the areas that hold particular promise for cancer control worldwide.

Chapter 3 of the book "National Control Programmes: Policies and Managerial Guidelines" is presented. It assesses the global patterns of cancer's annual death particularly in developing countries. It highlights the most common cancers around the world and the incidence rate of cancer in various parts of the body. A discussion on the psychosocial and economic impacts of the disease is also included.

This article focuses on aging and natural death. It is important to define the terms "life span" and "life expectancy" before proceeding with discussions of these concepts. Life span is best defined as the maximum survival potential of a particular species. One important cornerstone to Fries' predictions' is that there is a genetically defined human life are rapidly approaching. However, examination of several aging cell populations in vivo reveals that there is no evidence that aging of any organ or group of cells is caused by a limited number of replications. The basis for Fries' predictions is his premise that the human survival curve will continue to "rectangularize." This includes two assumptions: that death rates will remain low until a certain age (the horizontal component of the rectangle), and that the majority of deaths will occur over a short span of years (the vertical component of the rectangle). Fries predicts that this rectangularization will result in an average life expectancy of approximately 85 years in the first part of the next century.

The article reports that the Malvinas War of 1982 meant the loss of more than 600 Argentinean lives. The battle was tough and intense. Although the conflict was short, the Argentinean death rate equivalent to 1,000 soldiers per year was more than treble the rate of American deaths during the Second World War, and almost ten times greater than in Vietnam, showing both the concentration of British fire-power and the ferocious character of the combat. If, in a veteran's words, recollections are the eternal tenants of memory, oral history can be extremely helpful in making them sufferable. Of course, one must never forget that it will help nobody to confuse listening as a therapist with listening as a historian. There is an official past that enables a society to recognize itself as both heir and participant in a specific historical process; a past that feeds off and modifies collective memory, the area of social appropriation of the past, of collective retrospection, of management and control of the past.

Chapter 4 of the book "Everyday Life: Immigration, 1999" is presented. It describes the plight of immigrants who came to America during the 1800s. It points out that the death rate on immigrant ships approached 20 percent until the middle of the 1800s. It highlights the improvement in emigrant voyages following the introduction of the steamship in the 1840s.

This article analyzes the demographic patterns in Soviet Central Asia and examines the future development of the region. One of the most important characteristics of the demography of Soviet Central Asia is the rapid absolute and relative growth of its population. A progressive increase in the growth of the Central Asian population has occurred. During the Soviet period, in particular from 1926 to 1987, its population grew from 7.6 to 31.3 million, or more than four times. Population decline, however, occurred during World War II. It was not until 1950 that the prewar population was once again achieved. The most rapid rate of growth of the Central Asian population occurred between 1959 and 1970, when it grew 3.4 percent per year. The Central Asian republics are characterized by low crude death rates, largely as a result of the young age structure. In the 1980s, crude death rates in Central Asia generally ranged from 6 to 7 per thousand, in contrast to the Soviet average of 9 to 10. Infant mortality, however, is particularly high in Central Asia.

The article discusses the pathways through which inequality and loss of social cohesion are likely to affect health. The most important links are through the impact of psychosocial circumstances on health. The article draws on numerous examples, using very different methods, to demonstrate the powerful impact which psychosocial circumstances have on physical health and on death rates. The poor suffer the psychosocial effects of deprivation as well as its direct material effects. It is important to recognise that as well as the greatest material deprivation, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy also suffer the greatest social, psychological and emotional deprivation, and this may well have a greater impact on their health than the more direct effects of material deprivation. Although the apparent importance of social relations to health provides a pleasingly direct link between social cohesion and health, there is just a possibility that the results could be explained in terms of individual selection. If more sociable people turned out to be healthier because they have different psychological characteristics, a more sociable society might not improve health through this route.

The article looks at the particular causes of death which are most symptomatic of particularly inegalitarian countries. As well as identifying a set of obviously "social" causes indicative of social stress, it also notes statistical findings suggesting that higher crime rates, homicide and violence are associated with wider income differences. In addition, the article looks at several signs of increasing social malaise which accompanied the rapid widening of income differences in Britain during the later 1980s. In addition to alcohol and accidents, the tendency for death rates from infections to be higher in countries with wider income differences is also understandable in terms of the effects which stress is known to have on the immune system. Although heart disease is closely related to income differences in some countries, in general the association is weak--though stronger among women than men. Psychoneuroendocrinology provides possible explanations of why heart disease is related to socioeconomic stress.

The article focuses on the important differences in health which remain associated with differences in living standards within each country. The article explains the data used to assess these differences and then goes on to show why they cannot be attributed to genetics; why only a small part is played by healthier people moving up the social ladder and the less healthy moving down; why almost none of the health differences results from differences in medical care; and why the differences are only partly explained by health-related behaviour. Data from the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial in the U.S. enabled more than 300,000 men to be grouped into twelve income categories according to the median family income of the ZIP code area in which they lived. It showed that incomes and death rates were so closely related across all categories that it made no difference to the positions of eleven out of the twelve groupings whether they were ranked according to ascending income or descending death rates.

This article discusses about the increase in life expectancy. Perhaps the most important challenge facing those interested in population health is ignorance of why life expectancy continues to rise in most countries. Most of the world continues to enjoy a long-term decline in death rates which adds several years to life expectancy with every decade that passes. It may be thought that the role of qualitative change is important only in the long term. However, if in some sense qualitative change is the weightier component of change in the long term, then on average this will also be true within any short term. Indeed, one of the best ways of showing the importance of qualitative change is in understanding the poor predictive power of input-output analysis over periods as short as five years. The basis of input-output analysis is a table in which every industry is both a row and a column in the table. Each cell in the table shows what an industry in any row sold to the industries in each column. Thus the column for the motor industry shows how much it bought from the steel industry, from chemicals, paints, plastics, from office machinery makers, etc.

This section counterposes the perception that, having tried the alternative, poverty, richer is better and safer. The data on life expectancy and economic level for more recent times all point in the same direction: the lower the income, the higher the death rate at an earlier age. The common assumption that the costs involved in regulation are purely economic, not involving health, leads to divorcing wealth from health. One sign of the relationship between being poorer and being sicker is that most of the world's disasters occur in countries of low income.

This article addresses the death rate among German and Austrian soldiers in the Wehrmacht project, during World War II. In the Wehrmacht, there were different ways of reporting casualties. The Wehrmacht statistics were not accepted as correct figures, because these statistics do not cover the worst phase of the war and the fate of the prisoners of war, or the missing in action. There were several organizations, which collected all information concerning the fate of all soldiers during and after the war. In summary, while death rates in the air force and navy are the same for Germans and Austrians, a significant difference can be found in the army death rates.

This article focuses on the excess of female mortality, in European countries in comparison to that of developing countries like India, China, and Pakistan. Developing Europe, including Victorian England, was once characterized by pervasive excess female mortality in childhood, and so was developing Japan. While childbearing might be considered a natural biological hazard, excess female mortality in childhood and early adolescence is not caused by pregnancy or childbirth. Moreover, while high fertility populations might be expected to have excess female mortality among adult women younger than 45 years of age, many do not. These facts suggest that narrowly biological considerations are insufficient to explain excess female mortality. Instead it may involve the way gender was socially constructed by countries experiencing development. Economists who study excess female mortality among young girls routinely ignore policy issues to focus on differential labor force participation as the explanation for excess female mortality. Comparatively few sociologists have tried to estimate the impact of government behavior on human behavior related to health and mortality, possibly because health systems themselves are so often thought of as having developed over time under historically unique circumstances independent of government policy.

The region Compared with many of the modern economic regions of Britain, which exist more for administrative than any organic reason, the north-east does appear to have some intrinsic merits and historical validity as a region. If we take as the basic region the old administrative counties of Northumberland and Durham, it has reasonably well-defined geographical boundaries with the North Sea, the Scottish border, the central uplands and the river valley of the Tees. It was, therefore, firmly distinguished to the east, to the north (if really only by the ancient antagonisms of race) and to the west by hills which restricted mobility. Only to the south was the region weakly bounded in a sparsely populated agricultural and metal-mining area between the south Durham coalfield and the developing West Riding towns. More than the simple boundaries of regional geography gave the area some unity, however. In an age when overland transport was very costly, the sea was the major highway for the movement of heavy or bulky goods. It was, therefore, inevitable that commercial activity looked to the nearest coast for other than local trade and that towns such as Bishop Auckland, Durham, Hexham, Morpeth (and their environs) should look to the east and the market powers of towns such as Newcastle, Sunderland and Stockton with their river access to the sea. Ultimately (but paradoxically since it covered only a minor part of the region) it was the coal industry which gave unity to the region. In an age when its population was sparse and its other attractions limited, the north-east was to all intents and purposes (and especially to south-eastern intents and purposes) the Great Northern coalfield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of a continuing sense of national identity, Scotland in the eighteenth century was a country of marked regional and ethnic differences. The major division was between the English-speaking areas, all in what is called the Lowlands, and the area of Gaelic usage, the Highlands. The line dividing English from Gaelic speech had been narrowing down the Gaeltacht for centuries, and by the mid-eighteenth century lay very near to the great geological fault which makes the highland edge, though even so there were English-speaking areas to the north of the fault: most of the plain forming the southern coast of the Moray Firth, the town of Inverness, the triangle of Caithness lying beyond the county of Sutherland. The division was not simply one of speech, but of culture, social structure and the means of disseminating culture. There were, before the 1780s, practically no printed books in Gaelic: a translation of the psalms existed, but was not readily available, since it had never been properly distributed. The lack of an Old Testament in Gaelic meant that the imageries used in Scottish and in Gaelic literature were totally separate. Few even of educated men in the Highlands could express themselves in Gaelic on paper with accepted orthography. Gaelic culture was mostly conveyed in song, and usually by the physical presence of the singer. The poetic base of these songs might be the creation of either sex, though male assumptions have sometimes left the name of women poets unknown. The highland area was poor and economically backward, feeding itself marginally on its own grain and the erratic supply of milk and blood from its cattle. Difficulties in land transport perpetuated poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St. Petersburg, or Petrograd as it was named in deference to anti-German sentiment after the outbreak of world war in August 1914, was the main theater of revolutionary activity. But it was by no means the only one. Moscow and numerous other Russian cities figured prominently in the events that brought down the old order. In the final decades of late imperial Russia the changes associated with modernization profoundly altered the Russian city and transformed the conditions of daily life and labor for most of its inhabitants. Urban industrialization obviously played an important role in this general process of social, economic, and, ultimately, political change. In few places were the consequences more plainly to be seen than in the Empire's principal cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, which are the focus of attention in this chapter. My purpose is to describe some features of the urban environment that might serve as a backdrop to the revolution of 1917. Before embarking on this task, however, it is necessary to sketch in broad outline the pattern of population growth and industrial development in the Empire as a whole. Citizens and cities in late imperial Russia During the nineteenth century Russia grew significantly both in areal extent and in number of subjects. In the first quarter of the century the Caucasus region with its predominantly Christian, but ethnically diverse and non-Slavic peoples, was brought into the ambit of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before and after Let us first take a look at the birth and death columns which appear regularly in our newspapers: most of the announcements are to do with elderly people; there are some deaths of young adults or children, of course, usually the victims of accidents, but the typical announcement is that of the funeral of a widow of about 80, attended by two of her children and about four or five grandchildren. We have hardly any similar evidence for the sixteenth century, with the exception of a few family records, but by using the method of family reconstitution we could find analogous cases. To leave behind one or two children and four or five grandchildren, if one was lucky enough to live to 80, was not unusual. At first sight, there seems to be little difference in the composition of families and in the kinship relations: in the sixteenth century, as in the twentieth, the dominant type is the nuclear family, made up of father, mother and children. The gap between generations has not changed much either: about twenty-five to thirty years, as a result of a relatively high age of marriage; western Europe has never known adolescent marriage: in India, in 1891, the average age of girls on marriage was only 12½, while in western Europe it was as high as 23. The maximum life span has not changed much either: in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth, this does not exceed 115 years; and the reported cases of extreme old age owe more to the lack of official records or to general ignorance, than to the quality of life or the progress of medical science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watson: “Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?” Holmes: “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. … But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.” The task of demonstrating that Holmes's reply to Watson applies to more places than England is of primary concern in this chapter on regional and urban–rural differences and the often decisive factors of ethnicity and poverty in criminal activity in the Kaiserreich. That rising national-level crime rates do not always follow in the wake of urbanization and industrialization has already been shown by the longitudinal data presented in the last chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents notes regarding health-related statistics for the 51 Member States of the World Health Organization European Region published in "Atlas of Health in Europe." The author states that the mortality rates used in the book cover those representing the working age. The author also mentions that death rates provided in the statistics are age-standardized death rates.

Reports on the social condition in Somalia. Death rate of children in the country; Literacy rates; Food habits and preference of the Somalians; Portion of the country's population living in town such as Mogadishu and Berbera. INSETS: Let's Talk Somali;A Tradition-Or Just a Crime?.

The article presents an encyclopedia entry on modern theory, which claims that the changes involved in the development of industrial societies also cause declines in the status of elders and the development of ageism. Some of the changes pertains to the falling birth and death rates, which cause a rapid increase in the proportion of aged and the society, technology and automation which decrease the demand for older workers, leading to unemployment and competition between the generations for jobs, and new technology and changing occupational structure which make the job skills of older workers obsolete.

Chapter 7 of the book "Inheriting the World: The Atlas of Children's Health & the Environment" is presented. It explores the spread of malaria across the world. It states that ninety percent of at least one million deaths a year from malaria occur in Africa, mostly among young children. It asserts that malaria is one of the major public health challenges undermining development. It also presents statistics on the annual deaths of children under five years old from malaria.

The article focuses on the changes and trends in mortality and survivorship in developed countries. According to the author, the initial driving force for the aging of humans came from the transition to lower fertility in Western populations during the last quarter of the 19th century. Survival to later older age has changed significantly showing improvements in late adult death rates and large improvements in infant and child mortality.

A list of the sub-regions of the World Health Organization across the world is presented. This includes The Americas, with mortality strata of A, B and D for children under five years and males aged 15 to 59 years, South-East Asia, with mortality strata of B and D for children under five years and males aged 15 to 59 years, and Eastern Mediterranean, with mortality strata of B and D for children under five years and males aged 15 to 59 years.

The article presents a case study that illustrates how a policy-focused health-impacts assessment can lead to on-the-ground interventions to prevent hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS). The disease was characterized by acute respiratory distress with a high death rate among previously healthy persons in southwestern U.S. in 1993. It cites the approach that can be taken to predict HPS over six months in advance.