Originally posted in thread at http://missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/10067/heart-attacks-cancer-off-topic.
Brad Phipps' most excellent site http://missingepisodes.blogspot.co.nz/

Brad Phipps:

Just been updating the timeline page on my site (which isn't complete) to include obituaries of key people and it's really shocking how most people died from one of two ailments:

William Hartnell - Heart failure
David Whitaker - Cancer
Douglas Camfield - Heart attack
Dennis Spooner - Heart attack
Ian Marter - Heart attack
Patrick Troughton - Heart attack
Gerald Flood - Heart attack
Jacqueline Hill - Cancer
Jon Pertwee - Heart attack
Adrienne Hill - Cancer
Sydney Newman - Heart attack
Michael Craze - Heart attack
Anthony Ainley - Cancer
Peter Bryant - Cancer
Verity Lambert - Cancer
Barry Letts - Cancer
Elisabeth Sladen - Cancer
Caroline John - Cancer
Mary Tamm - Cancer

Just find it interesting.

[It is suggested Chernobyl is to blame for these cancer deaths.]

Me:

It's apparently revelatory to see it listed like this, but somewhat deceptive. With such little detail these two causes are pretty ubiquitous deaths. Hartnell had a series of strokes in his sixties, Camfield had his first known heart attack at 38. All deaths could be described as "heart attacks" as whatever the immediate cause, your heart stops. Any such list of contemporaries would give these two causes over and over.

Let's take American comic names ...

Jack Kirby (b. 1917, d. 1994) heart attack age 76 (probably due to smoking)
Joe Shuster (b. 1914, d. 1992) heart attack age 78 (hypertension)
Bill Finger (b. 1914, d. 1974) heart attack age 59 (although commonly referred to as alcoholism)
Mark Gruenwald (b. 1953, d. 1996) heart attack age 43 (congenital defect)
Gene Colan (b. 1926, d. 2011) cancer age 84 (complications due to cancer, liver disease)
Steve Gerber (b. 1947, d. 2008) lung disease age 60 (idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis)
Lee Falk (b. 1911, d. 1999) heart attack age 87

Try Jimmy Carter's cabinet for some gender balance ...

Edmund Muskie (b. 1914, d. 1996) heart attack age 81 (congestive heart failure)
G. William Miller (b. 1925, d. 2006) lung disease age 81 (idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis)(again)
Cyrus Vance (b. 1917, d. 2002) pneumonia, complications age 84 (Alzheimer's)
Patricia Roberts Harris (b. 1924, d. 1985) cancer age 60 (breast cancer)
Juanita M. Kreps (b. 1921, d. 2010) complications of Alzheimer's disease age 89
Griffin Bell (b. 1918, d. 2009) cancer age 90 (complications from pancreatic cancer)
Philip Klutznick (b. 1907, d. 1999) Alzheimer's disease age 92
James R. Schlesinger (b. 1929, d. 2014) complications from pneumonia age 85

... bit of a trend there with Steve Gerber and G. William Miller both having pulmonary fibrosis.
You could call all the Alzheimer's/complications "heart attacks" if you wanted to.

The rate of deaths due to radiation is highly contentious, the only way you could link a list as above to Chernobyl (1986) is if they were standing in the reactor when it blew its roof off. And if you wanted to get paranoid about cancer deaths from radiological accidents, no need to go this extremely tenuous route; Britain had a way more relevant one in the 1957 Windscale fire -- the uranium was set alight and only extinguished by the fire brigade forcing water through the reactor. If the original list was about a million times the size then you might have an argument you could attribute one cancer death to a radiation source, whether Windscale, Chernobyl, cosmic rays, bananas or just plain old background count. And that's in the most extreme analysis.

What all the others who died?
It sounds worse when you only show specific ones.

What percentage of those you shown compare to the UK average for those ailments?
How do they compare.

That's an EXCELLENT question.
The Office of National Statistics gives it at about 30% for cancer, slightly less for heart disease.

To break it down; 31% cancer for women, 28% for men. The disparity is much higher for women due to breast cancer, removing this bias (plus other gender based cancers and lung cancer), it's significantly higher for men. Higher in Scotland than other regions. Cancer mortality has dropped while incidence is growing; treatment has been working.

Heart disease is quoted at 15.6% (men) and 10.3% (women) for 2011. However I detect a reporting bias. As the Who names are given via friends/family/agents/other actors I suspect "heart attack" covers a lot of ailments. The next three causes given (following heart disease and lung cancer) are stroke, emphysema/bronchitis, dementia and Alzheimer’s and flu/pneumonia, averaging to about 6% across the genders. I suspect the last three groups would end up being called "heart attack" in this context. Where Carter's cabinet are reported via nursing homes/hospices, doctors or coroners, hence way more accurate causes described. The Who list could be padded in favour of heart attacks two fold.

Roughly 30% each by gender and cause if you accept the oversimplification in reporting.

So, I submit what we've got here is a mundane list of causes which look significant through biased reporting, misattribution of cause and selection of candidates.

Sources.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ The Office of National Statistics is the UK equivalent of the Australian Bureau of Statistics; their graphs on 2012 deaths were highly revealing.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/ Cancer Research UK is a non-government organisation and charity. Their tables on cancer rates for 2011 gave context to the ONS raw data.