The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from Colin Mowl, dated 15 November 2007:
The National Statistician has been asked to reply to your recent question asking how many people over the age of 85 died from (a) Clostridium difficile and (b) MRSA infections in each year since 1997. I am replying in her absence. (165334)
Special analyses of deaths involving MRSA and Clostridium difficile are undertaken annually by ONS for England and Wales. These are published in Health Statistics Quarterly. The latest year for which such figures are available is 2005.
The data requested are presented in the table below.
(1) Clostridium difficile (2) MRSA (a) Mentions (b) Underlying Cause (a) Mentions (b) Underlying Cause 1997 5Not available 5Not available 104 27 1998 5Not available 5Not available 104 33 1999 439 259 133 35 2000 5Not available 5Not available 175 50 2001 592 359 204 86 2002 677 389 204 80 2003 890 506 281 103 2004 1,072 634 343 128 2005 1,847 1,056 511 184 1 Identified using the methodology described in Office for National Statistics (2005) Report: Deaths involving Clostridium difficile: England and Wales, 1999-2004. “Health Statistics Quarterly” 30, 56-60. 1 Identified using the methodology described in Griffiths C, Lamagni TL, Crowcroft NS, Duckworth G and Rooney C (2004) Trends in MRSA in England and Wales: analysis of morbidity and mortality data for 1993-2002. Health Statistics Quarterly 21, 15-22. 2 Excludes neonatal deaths. 3Clostridium difficile: Deaths registered in 1999, deaths occurring in 2001-05. 4 MRSA: Deaths occurring in each year. 5 All deaths in England and Wales are coded by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The Tenth revision (ICD-10) has been used by the ONS since 2001. In the Ninth revision of the ICD (ICD-9) there are no specific codes that would allow deaths mentioning Clostridium difficile to be easily identified. Identifying these deaths in ICD-9 would require extensive text searching of a very large number of death certificates. This could only be done at disproportionate cost. Data for 1997, 1998 and 2000 are therefore not available as ICD-9 was used in these years. Deaths registered in 1999 in England and Wales were coded to both ICD-9 and ICD-10 as part of a special study to compare the two ICD revisions, and have therefore been used to give an additional year of data on deaths involving C. diff. Data is available for MRSA in both ICD-9 and ICD-10.