UK Stats: Deaths during "Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium"

I was fairly surprised how badly the UK fares in the Cancer Mortality statistics compared to our continental and Transatlantic cousins. So when I heard that some UK hospitals were reputed to have a very poor comparative record for maternal survival rates, I thought it might be informative to dig out the national numbers, given I had the spread sheet downloaded already.

Basically, the Office of National Statistics collates data from the causes of death as certified by a doctor or coroner and releases the data periodically. Typically there is good quality coverage in the UK, and the data is classified using ICD-10 disease codes for helpful comparative purposes. The last full year was 2010, for the which the data was released in Oct-2011.

So the head-line numbers for this rather unfortunate way to perish are as follows;

Of the 236,732 women whose deaths were registered in 2010 there were 35 for whom the final cause of death was recorded in the category "Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium".  (Def. "puerperium" Medline)



The absolute counts of deaths (other age segments are zero):

			Total	Under 1	1-4	5-9	10-14	15-19	20-24	25-29	30-34	35-49	40-44
O00-O99	XV Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium	F	35	-	-	-	-	2	3	12	12	3	3

Respiratory disease in the UK during the Clinton administration?

What is going on in the middle of this chart?



One of the comments was:

Hmmmm… what’s up with respiratory disease in the UK during the Clinton administration?