Cause specific social class mortality differentials for child injury and poisoning in England and Wales.

Injury is the leading cause of death in children in the United Kingdom. The social class gradient for injury death is steeper than for any other cause of child death. Nevertheless, the Government publication Variations in Health makes little reference to socioeconomic variations in childhood injury mortality.' The failure to address this important source ofvariation in health may be due to the lack of recent data on childhood mortality differentials. To date, the principal source of data on social class mortality differentials has been the Childhood Supplement on Occupational Mortality 197983.2 However, as pointed out in Variations in Health, "accidental deaths in children have fallen to little more than half their level of around 1980, and the social class pattern may have changed". We examined social class injury mortality differentials for period 1985-92.