Which of the following is not considered a key vital statistic?

• A. Attack rate and morbidity rate
• B. Incidence and prevalence rate
• C. Maternal mortality rate and fetal death rate
• D. Relative risk

Answer: (D)

Vital statistics are population-level measures that describe how often health events occur in a population over a period of time. They include counts and rates that summarize disease occurrence and outcomes, such as incidence, prevalence, and mortality (including maternal mortality and fetal death). They also cover outbreak contexts, where attack rate is used to describe the proportion of people who become ill in a group during an outbreak.

Relative risk, on the other hand, is an analytic measure used to compare the risk of a health outcome between two groups (for example, exposed versus unexposed). It describes the strength of an association within a study, not the frequency of events in the population as a whole. Because it doesn’t summarize population-level occurrence or outcomes, it isn’t considered a vital statistic.

So the item that does not fit with vital statistics is the measure of association between groups, not a population frequency or outcome rate.