Thank you for downloading this week's Morales podcast. Here's Tim Harsford.

Hello and welcome to the last Morales of the series. We are, of course, your regular guide to numbers in everyday life, in the headlines, and even in the House of Lords.

We will be aware that 650 is the product of three prime numbers. Two, five squared, and 13.

This week we'll be asking how unemployment can both rise and in the same new story stay the same. We'll discuss our favourite number books with Alex Bellos and Rachel Riley.

And was Monday really the most depressing day of the year.

But first, another week, another reform from the government, and this time it was the NHS, and a chance for Morales to scrutinise the facts being repeated across the airwaves and in the papers.

It also caught the attention of loyal listener John Mitchell. He heard the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, on PM earlier in the week.

Cancer survival rates in some of the most common cancers, nowhere in England as they are as good as they are right across Sweden, for example.

Or twice as likely to die of a heart attack in this country as you are in France. We have deaths from lung disease that are amongst the worst in Europe.

So we do have to have better outcomes.

And with a minute of this being broadcast, Mr Mitchell emailed Morales at BBC.co.uk with his suspicions about the claim.

Will the government next be saying, you are twice as likely to die if you live in the UK compared with France? A job for Morales I think.

It was a very similar claim to that made by the Prime Minister David Cameron earlier in the day.

We've fallen behind the rest of Europe. We spend similar amounts of money, but we're more likely to die of cancer or heart disease.

I don't think we should put up with a second rate with coming second best.

Interesting one. And of course as John Mitchell implies, if the percentage of people who die of heart disease and cancer is high in the UK,

the percentage of people who die of anything else must be lower.

But beyond that simple piece of arithmetic, is it really true that the UK is so far behind our continental cousins?

And is the NHS to blame? Where's Lee Stevens from here? How's the nation's health ways?

Well first, let's look at Andrew Lansley's claim that we're not doing so well on lung disease.

Here he seems to be correct, but he also talks about heart attacks.

And David Cameron in his piece talked about heart disease, and we've been looking at the heart disease figures,

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