Deaths in children under 10 from influenza 2013 to 2022

FOI REF: FOI-2023-1439

You asked

Please could you provide me with the following information, broken down by age and year.

1. How many young children aged between 0 to 10 have died solely due to influenza in the past 10 years?
2. How many children aged 0 to 10 that have died from influenza in the past 10 years had pre-existing health conditions?

We said

Thank you for your request. 

Our mortality data comes from the information collected at death registration. All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules.   

The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:  

a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury  

The ICD-10 cause codes Influenza are J09 to J11. 

Please note that deaths where influenza was the only condition on the death certificate and deaths "solely due to influenza" are not identical, because in some cases the other conditions mentioned might be complications or manifestations of the influenza. These would be counted as deaths where influenza was the underlying cause but not the only condition. 

The death certificate is not intended to contain all health conditions from which the deceased suffered at the time of death unless they caused or contributed to the death. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty how many of the deceased had pre-existing health conditions. 

The associated download 'Child Influenza deaths 2013-2022.xls' shows the number of deaths registered for children under 11 years where influenza was (1) the only condition on the death certificate, (2) the underlying cause of death, and (3) mentioned on the death certificate. Note that column (1) is a subset of column (2) which is a subset of column (3). Figures are for deaths registered in England and Wales for the years 2013-2022. 

When viewing the file please note the following:

1. Figures are for deaths registered rather than deaths occurring. For more information see our Impact of registration delays publication. 

2. For deaths over 28 days, the Tenth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) has been used to classify cause of death in the publication. The ICD is used to translate diagnoses of diseases and other health problems from words into alphanumeric code to permit easier storage, retrieval and analysis. For deaths registered from 1 January 2022, cause of death is coded to the ICD-10 classification using MUSE 5.8 software. Deaths registered between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 were coded to the using MUSE 5.5 and previous years were coded to IRIS 4.2.3. For more information click here.

3. Figures for underlying cause exclude neonatal deaths as it is not possible to identify a single underlying cause for neonatal deaths or stillbirths. More information can be found in section 6 of our User Guide to Infant and Child Mortality Statistics.

For further information please contact Health.data@ons.gov.uk.