[Report 1954] / Medical Officer of Health, Anglesey County Council.
- Anglesey (Wales). County Council. no2003102100.
- Date:
- 1954
Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Credit: [Report 1954] / Medical Officer of Health, Anglesey County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.
102/120 page 100
![deaths respectively in these age groups from this cause. The fractions work out at 0.78 and 0.50. We now work out the corres- ponding fractions for the age groups between 45 and 84 years and add to give us the total, in this case it comes to 9.90. The population under the age of 35 is not taken into account in this particular example because the mortality from this cause under the age of 35 years is negligible. There were for instance in 1951 only 101 deaths in the whole of England and Wales from cancer of the breast in females under the age of 35 years. Our calculation tells us that we .should have expected 9.9 deaths from this cause in Anglesey in one particular year, 1951. In any one county district therefore the expected” number is bound to be small in any single year. For this reason we must pool the experience -of several years in order to obtain information of any value. In what follows the experience of the seven years 1948 to 1954 is examined. The observed” deaths in Anglesey are derived from the Registrar General’s figures for the j^ears 1950-54 and, for the years 1948-49, from data collected for an anlysis of local cancer mortality which was published in the British Journal ot Cancer. The expected” numbers have been calculated as described from the mortality rates in England and Wales in the central year, 1951, as applied to the census populations in Anglesey in that year, and multiplied by seven to give an expected” number during the seven year period. There are certain obvious sources of error in this procedure. In the first place the population of Anglesey in the age-sex groups employed was not, of course, exactly the same in 1948 or in 1954 as in 1951. Whatever the error may be from this source it is unavoidable because we do not know the exact age-sex composition of the population in any of the seven years except 1951. Another objection might be that the mortality in England and Wales varied between 1948 and 1954. This may be true (mortality rates by age-sex groups have not yet been published for 1952 onwards, so that the point cannot be proved), but the error—again unavoidable—arising from taking the rates for the central year is not likely to be serious. A check on the ex- pected” number of cancer of the breast deaths in females in Anglesey has been done by taking the deaths recorded in England and Wales during 1948-53 (the last year hitherto for which the figiires have been published) and a])plying them to the England and Wales census population to obtain age specific rates which were then applied to the Anglesey census population. The resulting figure (10.1) differs by only 2 per cent, from that (9.9) obtained in the way described previously. The results of our calculations are set out in Table 36.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28825561_0104.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
