Annual number of deaths from dog attacks or bites

FOI REF: FOI/2023/1035

You asked

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, can your organisation reveal the annual number of deaths from dog attacks (or dog bites - W54 bitten as referred to in an FOI made public in 2021 for deaths between 1981 to 2019) in England and Wales between 2019 and 2022?

We said

Thank you for your request. 

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. Using the ICD-10 look up  the following ICD-10 code W54 is used for deaths involving being bitten or struck by a dog.  

Using our NOMIS webservice, we can provide deaths for 2013 to 2021.  

The associated download is an output from NOMIS for England and Wales. If you would like further disaggregation of the data from NOMIS please see the following instructions to extract data from this site:

• Select period – 2021 to 2013.  

• Select the geography (England and Wales, regional or by local authority).  

• Age – All ages or 5-year age bands.  

• Select Gender – Total or Male/Female   

• Select rates – All deaths, rates, or percentage of population for example.  

• Select cause of death (ICD10 code search is available).   

• Select format (Excel or CSV for example)    

For historic data, you can find this in our 20th Century Mortality files.  Data from 2001 to 2021 can be found in the 21st Century Mortality Files. 

We will publish 2022 data in July 2023, this is to allow the inclusion of late registrations, which are deaths referred for Coroner investigation. This data will be released as part of the Deaths Registered Series, 21st Century Mortality Files, and be available for download from NOMIS.  

We can provide a bespoke dataset using provisional data, however, please note this would be subject to change. These bespoke datasets are available to order from the HALE Customer services team and are subject to disclosure control, legal frameworks, resources and subject to agreement to costs, where applicable. Please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk to access this service.