© 2004 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors Research

The 1995 Canadian National Forum on CervicalCancer Screening asserted: “In a perfect world,there ought not to be any deaths due to cervical cancer.”1 Since cervical cancers are detectable and treatable at an early stage, most deaths from this disease are avoid-able.2 In 2000 an estimated 1450 women in Canada re-ceived the diagnosis of cervical cancer, and an estimated 430 women died from the disease in the same year. Of all cancers among women, cervical cancer had the 12th high-est incidence and the 14th highest death rate.3 The purpose of this study was to examine trends in rates of death from cervical cancer by neighbourhood income in urban Canada from 1971 to 1996, and to determine whether income-related differentials in mortality have di-minished as expected since publicly funded universal health insurance was introduced in Canada, in the early 1970s. The reduction of socioeconomic inequities in health is an important aspect of population health, which aims to “re-duce inequities in the underlying conditions that put some Canadians at a disadvantage for attaining and maintaining optimal health.”4 In addition, we compared Canadian data on cervical cancer incidence and mortality with those for the body of the uterus, and compared trends in cervical cancer death rates for selected countries. Methods The methods of studies of mortality by neighbourhood in-come have been described in detail elsewhere.5 In brief, death registrations for residents of Canadian census metropolitan areas (excluding those in institutions) in census years 1971, 1986, 1991 and 1996 were assigned to census tracts, based on the postal code or address of the deceased’s usual place of residence. Be-cause data on deaths for 1976 and 1981 were not coded to cen-sus tract, we did not include those years in the current analysis. The underlying cause of death had previously been coded to the ICD-8 (International Classification of Diseases, 8th revision6) for deaths in 1971 and to the ICD-9 (9th revision7) for deaths i