Papers and reports

The Working Party on AIDS was established in April 1987 to give the profession information about, and to take any necessary action in relation to, the problems posed by HIV infection and AIDS. Three Bulletins have been issued by the Working Party, in September 1987, December 1987 and July 1988. These Bulletins covered what the Working Party saw as the important aspects of the problem from the point of view of the profession.

A paper about the Appointed Actuary is essentially a paper about prudential supervision of life insurance companies. The system which has operated in the UK since the mid-1970’s is only partly one of Government supervision. Through the professional role of the Appointed Actuary, it also contains elements of a system of self-regulation with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries standing in place of SRO’s.

This note continues a regular series on mortality rates in Great Britain; the previous note in the series appeared in JIA 114 and dealt with mortality in 1984 and 1985.

A common method of measuring relative mortality experience in actuarial, demographic and epidemiological studies is by way of comparison of the actual number of deaths and the number expected if a given standard experience were applicable. The properties of this method are discussed. Further ways of making such a comparison are described, one of which (the widely used Cumulative Mortality Ratio) has a serious bias in application to follow-up mortality studies. The properties of an alternative approach, the Ratio of Geometric Average Death Rates (RAD), are also discussed.

The Decennial Supplement on Occupational Mortality published in 1978 commented on mortality differences between the social classes using data from the 1971 Census and the deaths in the period 1970–72. The analysis was based on life tables prepared for the individual social classes from which derived indices, for example expectations of life, were calculated. It is proposed here to repeat this exercise using the data for males recently published in microfiche form by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.