The Short Form

The World Health Organization recognizes 999 different categories of diseases, injuries and causes of death, including 125 methods of suicide. But in those parts of the world that are not used to statistics, tabulating figures on who died of what has proved difficult. What good, for instance, is a death certificate written on the bark of a baobab tree along a branch of the upper Zambezi? So WHO decided that what it needed was something like the U.S. income-tax collector's 1040-A--a short form that nobody can gum up.

In Paris, 50 delegates from all over the world met to seek uniform and simpler methods of reporting death. Their aim: a questionnaire with only 50 categories. Explained one expert: "We want to phrase our questionnaire so that chiefs of aboriginal tribes and village medicine men can understand it--so we can get answers like: 'X. died of a bellyache, Y was killed by a lion, and Mme. Z. passed away after childbirth.' "

The new "short form" will soon go out to WHO representatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As the doctors wound up their conference last week, Denmark's H. C. Gram thanked their Paris hosts in a speech based on the old, long list: Paris, he said, "saved us from E933" (hunger, thirst and exposure), so that in future, delegates would "instantly suppress 310" (anxiety) when called on to return to Paris. Not participating in the conference were Iron Curtain doctors, who abandoned WHO in 1949, possibly embarrassed by E985 on the list (execution).

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