I. [ Macroepidemiology: National Mortality Data for US and JAPAN ]

Organizing and analyzing the historical, age and cohort mortality rates for cancers and other major causes of death in the United States since 1890 and in Japan since 1952.

The original organization of this extensive macroepidemiology database was the work Dr. Pablo Herrero-Jimenez now an executive of St. Lawrence Cement, Ltd. Dr. Herrero-Jimenez uncovered and transcribed the relevant mortality data for the United States from annual publications of Vital Statistics of the United States ( U.S. Census Bureau, 1890-1935; U.S. Public Health Service, 1936-1997)) and matched it with the appropriate Census Bureau population data from the year 1890-1992 for the United States.

The complete description of this extraordinary effort is recorded in his MIT Ph.D. thesis, "Determination of the historical changes in primary and secondary risk factors for cancer using U.S. public health records."(2001). His immediate area of study was the US national cancer data but he responded to broad interest in lung diseases and other forms of mortality, an interest reflected in the list of diseases available herein.

The U.S. data were updated to 1997 by MIT undergraduate Efren Gutierez who then went to the Harvard Medical School. The Japanese data 1952-1995 were transcribed by a toxicology graduate student, Mr. Jose A. Marquez.

Mr. Lohith Kini is responsible for rearranging the website to its present form. He has made it possible to inspect the data both in terms of raw birth year interval and age-specific interval mortality rates as Dr. Herrero-Jimenez had done but also in terms of birth year and calendar year specific mortality allowing facile inspection of changing mortality rates with history. Mr. Kini also undertook to correct all age interval mortality rates for the coincidence expected from deaths of all other causes, a correction of crucial importance in analyzing age-specific mortality rates in ages 60-104 yrs.

Visit the link under the [DATA] tab for all data in EXCEL and TXT format for Japan and US mortality data.


Under construction.