Comparing world regions.

Statement of acute infectious diseases in the State of Hamburg, Germany measles. In comparison with the figures of the preceding year the number of cases in 1895 was extraordinarily small. The same is true of the years 1888 and 1889, an epidemic season being followed by a favourable season. It is a striking instance of the tendency of measles to recur in force every sixth year. Introduction In this chapter, we explore patterns of mortality attributable to each of our marker diseases and all causes over the period 1888–1912 at the meso-scale of ten world regions. The analyses described in chapter 4 which were based upon the time series for the 100 individual cities (as opposed to the global series built from the separate city records) showed that spatial differences in mortality were to be found – as between cities in developed and developing regions and across cultural and environmental variables, for example. One problem is to decide how we may best capture such geographical variations in more detail. As we shall see in chapter 6, given seven diseases and 100 cities, any study of the behaviour of disease in the separate cities can only realistically sample from the minimum of 700 time series that might be considered. Confronted with this wealth of data, examination of patterns at the intermediate level of world regions achieves several ends: it eliminates the need to sample; ten regions is manageable and yet presents us with sufficient spatial detail to identify regional contrasts; and it forms a regional context for the examination of selected individual city series in the next chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]