Mortality
The central Registrar office in Bangkok maintains computerized
records from individual death certificates, which
are filed by individual district offices all over Thailand.
The Registrar office provided us with selected death certificate
data for every death in their data files for the 38
districts of the City of Bangkok from 1992 through 1995.
Death certificates are filed at the district where the death
occurs. When the data were provided, the Registrar office
notified us that they were changing to an online computer
system with the district offices as of January 1, 1996.
Because of the transition to the new system, they were
aware that the December 1995 data were incomplete. Our
data set therefore includes deaths only through the end
of November 1995.
We used the individual death certificate data to determine
the number of deaths each day in Bangkok in total
and in various cause-of-death and age-at-death categories
that might be related to air pollution exposure. The primary
cause of death was coded from the death certificate