As the media hate good news, the story of the extraordinary decline in deaths from heart disease in the UK has not received as much attention as it deserves. The graph below is from the British Heart Foundation's Coronary Heart Disease Statistics 2010 edition and shows that the mortality rate is less than a third of what it was forty years ago. Since 1980, the decline has been remarkably consistent and it has even gone below the government's target (something of a rarity, as these targets tend to be arbitrary).