Death certificates for deaths caused by air pollution

Dyddiad y datganiad:
18 May 2023

FOI REF: FOI/2023/5094

You asked

I would like to see copies of the relevant death certificates that relate to deaths caused by air pollution.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry

We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. National Records Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. If you wish to obtain data for these countries, NRS and NISRA can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.

Causes of death are certified in most cases by a doctor, who records the sequence of medical conditions and relevant events leading to, or contributing to, the death, based on the deceased's healthcare records and other available information, such as laboratory tests or post-mortem investigation. Some deaths are certified by a coroner who determines the causes of death following an inquest, based on all the available evidence. It is unusual for wider contextual factors such as exposure to pollution or air quality to be recorded among the causes of death.

One death in England and Wales in the period 2001 to 2021 had exposure to air pollution (International Classification of Diseases, tenth revision (ICD-10) code Z581) recorded on the death certificate. Analysis of 2022 data will be published in July 2023 to allow the inclusion of late registrations, which are deaths referred for Coroner investigation.

We have recently published experimental analysis of the risk of deaths involving Coronavirus (COVID-19) mortality and long-term outdoor air pollution for people living in areas with different air pollution exposure levels within London.

Please note this analysis looks at a cohort of 737,356 individuals aged 10 to 110 years, usually resident in London, who tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) in NHS Test and Trace data between 1 September 2020 and 12 December 2021.

Of these, 9,315 individuals (1.3%) died of coronavirus-related causes by 18 January 2022.

The data source for the study was the Office for National Statistics' (ONS's) Public Health Data Asset (PHDA). These data were linked to mid-2018 population density data, national testing data from NHS Test and Trace using Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 data, and 2016 annual average air pollution concentrations from the London Data Store, using postcodes of residence from the 2011 Census.

The experimental analysis found that air pollution exposure had little impact on the risk of dying from COVID-19 among people who lived in London and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. When comparing people of the same sex and age, we found that those who lived in more polluted areas were at greater risk of death after infection. However, this relationship disappeared when we accounted for other factors, such as deprivation or ethnicity, suggesting that long-term air pollution has no large effect on the risk of dying from COVID-19."

If you have any queries regarding these publications, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.

It may also be more informative to consider epidemiological studies which estimate numbers or proportions of incidence and deaths which can be attributed to exposure to pollution or poor air quality. A number of reports have been published by Public Health England (now the UK Health Security Agency) on different aspects of air pollution and health.