FOI reference: FOI-2024-1957
You asked
Please can I request statistics on the numbers of children and adults in England that have been injured by or died from the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty or no fire alarm systems?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We produce statistics on births and deaths. These are taken from information provided from the birth or death certificate. We do not hold any information on injury where there has been recovery. NHS England produce Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and can be contacted via their FOI service. HES is a curated data product containing details about admissions, outpatient appointments and historical accident and emergency attendances at NHS hospitals in England.
Related to deaths, please note that:
All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules. The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:
the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury
At the Office for National Statistics (ONS), we use the term "due to" to refer to the underlying cause of a death and the term "involving" where a cause is mentioned anywhere on the death certificate. Further, please note we do not hold specific information regarding the circumstances of the death. Therefore, we cannot directly attribute deaths to faulty or no fire alarm systems.
Deaths where the underlying cause is assigned to an external cause are also assigned at least one nature of injury code (Chapter XIX) or a post-procedural code not within Chapter XIX. This means it is possible to have more than one nature of injury code for a single death. However, it is necessary to select which one of the nature of injury codes is to be identified as the one causing death. This one cause code is referred to by ONS as the secondary cause. More information is available in section 9.2 of the user guide to mortality statistics which you can access via the following link
Using ICD-10, deaths from toxic effects of carbon monoxide would be given a nature of injury code of T58. Deaths registered in England and Wales contains data in Table 9a which covers the number of deaths from external causes of morbidity and mortality (ICD-10 Chapter XX) by secondary cause and age group, males, England and Wales, registered 2022. 86 deaths were registered under T58 in England and Wales in 2022.
We also hold ad-hoc analysis published as user requested data:
Please find this user requested table which contains number of deaths due to accidental poisoning by carbon monoxide, England and Wales, deaths registered in 2022.
Data on carbon monoxide deaths and poisonings between 2010 and 2020 are also available.
If you would like to request a bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. Please note, there may be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.