OBJECTIVE Sweden has the lowest child injury mortality rate in the world, 5.2/100 000 for children under 15. This paper describes temporal trends in Sweden, as well as gender related and geographic differences. DESIGN The Swedish Cause-of-Death Register (1987-2001) and the Hospital Patient Register (1987-2002) were used to compare rates for the country as a whole and for discharges aged 0-20 ...

A lthough it sounds disastrous, making a $100,000 mistake seems relatively minor when stockbrokers have lost millions by hitting the wrong key. The following case proved to be different, however. An ordinary bank customer, Grete Fossbakk, used Internet banking to transfer a large amount to her daughter. She keyed one digit too many into the account number field, however, inadvertently sending t...

Objective: To calculate the cost of angina pectoris to the UK National Health Service (NHS) in the year 2000. Methods: Calculation of the cost of hospital admissions, revascularisation procedures, hospital outpatient consultations, general practice (GP) consultations, and prescribed drug treatment. Results: 634 000 individuals (1.1% of the UK population) consulted GPs 2.35 million times, costin...

In this issue of International Journal of Epidemiology, Gajalakshmi and Peto publish their results from a community study of deaths from injury in a rural district of Tamil Nadu, south India. The results reported are just one component of a large verbal autopsy study in which families were interviewed about the cause of death of 38 836 people. The study adds greatly to our knowledge of the epid...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess avoidable hospitalisation as an indicator of quality of primary care by examining trends and gender and ethnic variations. DESIGN AND SETTING Aggregated nationwide data in Singapore from 1991 to1998 were analysed for hospitalisations for chronic diseases that are avoidable by timely, appropriate, and effective primary care: asthma, congestive heart failure, chronic ...

To support their argument that results of cancer screening trials based on disease-specific mortality are unreliable, Black et al. (1) compared the treatment effect measured by disease-specific mortality with the effect measured by all-cause mortality in 12 such trials. They found “major inconsistencies” between the two measures. We disagree with their interpretation and illustrate our reasons ...

Context. The presence of titanium oxide (TiO) and vanadium oxide (VO) gas phase species is searched for in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter HD 209458b. Aims. We compared a model for the planet’s transmitted spectrum to multi-wavelength eclipse-depth measurements (from 3 000 to 10 000 Å), obtained by Sing et al. (2008a) using archived HST-STIS time series spectra. We make use of these observati...