The standardized population of the World Health Organization and Colombia: A methodological note

Abstract

In the middle of the 19th century, British health professionals saw the difficulty of making comparisons between the mortality of the different regions of England and Wales. Some places, such as the south of the island, concentrated many pensioners seeking a more pleasant climate for their retirement. Its aging population had, for obvious reasons, a high mortality rate compared to urban centers such as London, Manchester or Liverpool, or to the agricultural areas of the north, which had a much younger population.
In those days, in 1842, the English reformer Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), alarmed by the situation of the impoverished working class in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in the midst of the Victorian era of the British Empire, had published The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, and had proposed a first standard that would allow some adjustment when comparing populations; his proposal was to take the mean age at death. However, it was the Scottish actuary Francis Neison who came up with what would be recognized as the "direct method" for making comparisons, not only of mortality but also of the incidence or prevalence of numerous diseases between different geographical locations, or between different historical moments in the same place.