Got something different for you today. This is a scientific paper I just stumbled upon that piqued my interested.
You may have seen in the news the occasional story of someone found dead in advanced decay in their home...
Imagine going amiss for months or even years.. Nobody checking out if you are alive or not.. No friends, no family, no neighbors... Heck, not even the state 😅
And you may have even noticed an increasing trend reported in the news... But is there really an increasing trend or is it just a bias due to being bombarded with negative news by the media?
Well, the study in question, by researchers at University of Oxford, set out to explore exactly that...at least when it comes to England and Wales, as the title suggests 😅
A deathly silence: why has the number of people found decomposed in England and Wales been rising?
The researchers used data from the Office for National Statistics and took a novel approach to identify deaths in a state of advanced decomposition
Deaths coded as R98 ("unattended death") and R99 ("other ill-defined and unknown causes of mortality") according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and previous versions, referred to as “undefined deaths”.
But why these two codes?
We focused on those deaths where decomposition has reached the stage where it was no longer possible to determine a cause of death.
To reach severe decomposition would take some time and would strongly suggest that the deceased was extremely isolated in the perimortem period.
The tldr of the study is that there does seem to be an increasing trend in the passing of time, with men having a good lead due to male privilege whatever.
The increase in people found dead from unknown causes suggests wider societal breakdowns of both formal and informal social support networks. They are concerning and warrant urgent further investigation.
An interesting finding was what happened in the 1990s and 2000s
a rapid increase in the 1990s and 2000s. The increase seen for both sexes in the 1990s and 2000s is particularly surprising given the substantial improvements seen in mortality during this period.
Maybe the rise of technology that brings us closer together yet further apart? Dunno.
Just another paper showing we get lonelier and lonelier...
Anyways, next time say a hello to that neighbor of yours or whatever. Maybe they will notice the moment you go amiss instead of reporting the stench coming out of your apartment years after the fact 😅
References & Further Reading