Full Story in The Independent 15 March 2018
Experts have called on the Government to explain why there were more than 10,000 “additional deaths” in England and Wales in the first few weeks of 2018.
An editorial published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) showed that during the first seven weeks of the year, there were 93,990 deaths.
But in the same period over the previous five years an average of 83,615 people died.
The authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Oxford have called on the Government and health service bosses to urgently investigate and explain the rise.
“This rise of 12.4 per cent, or 10,375 additional deaths, was not due to the ageing of the population,” the editorial read.