Science / Medicine : Putting Death on Hold

Some people apparently are able to postpone their deaths until after a major social occasion, say U.S. sociologists who studied mortality figures before and after the Jewish Passover holiday. In the British magazine Lancet, David Phillips and Elliot King of UC San Diego reported their findings in an article relating to Jewish and non-Jewish deaths around Passover in California from 1966 to 1984.

“In the total Jewish sample, the number of deaths was lower than expected in the week before Passover and higher than expected in the week after,” the article said. A larger control group of Chinese and Japanese showed no evidence of a Passover pattern in mortality.

The study said that among Jewish men, deaths increased by 25.8% in the week after the holiday compared to the week before the festival. The researchers said their statistics for women could not be as conclusive as those for men because many women who had Jewish-sounding family names were not Jewish, but had married Jews.

“Our findings,” they report, “that some people’s deaths are postponed until they have reached a meaningful occasion, are consistent with two hypotheses: That the will to live is associated with reduced mortality and that communal social events can have a beneficial impact on the course of death.”