I suppose on the one hand, death certs are ONLY concerned with what a person died of, they are not intended to be a medical history of that person.
However, like Nell, I am endlessly annoyed and upset that my father's death cert contains such an obscure cause of death that it is meaningless - the registrar had to phone the doctor concerned, in my presence, to try to discover what the death cause meant. (Dad died of a massive unspecified infection which took him from cutting down trees on Sunday afternoon to dead by Monday night).
I am also intrigued as to how "they" can come up with such statistics as "One third of all deaths are smoking related" (or whatever it is) as this kind of information does not appear on death certs.
OC
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