Word: reports
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...live as long as a white man in his hometown. The reasons - just like the reasons that the Japanese and Swedes live longer than the Ukrainians, and why aborigines in Australia on average die 17 years earlier than non-aborigines - are almost entirely social, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) released today...
...considered adding the words Environmental Economic, Political, and Cultural to describe the determinants in their group's official title, but then figured that would make it too unwieldy. "It can get a bit silly," Marmot says. "So we just said, Social includes all that.") But the Commission's new report highlights social factors that go well beyond having enough money to buy a doctor's care or medication, and well beyond having the know-how to use it. The world's poor tend to die prematurely and log more life-years spent ill or suffering or depressed also because they...
...Commission's ultimate finding, however, is that "it does not have to be this way." Differences in longevity have many causes - the poor in America, for instance, are more likely than the rich to suffer diabetes, obesity or death in a gang fight - but with the new report, WHO aims to uncover "the causes of the causes." It sets out not to cure diabetes or crack down on violence, but to pinpoint the social factors that make the more poorly likely to suffer, and this "gradient," or the degree to which different groups are unequal in health, is far steeper...
...narrow the inequalities of circumstance and opportunity that affect health. The suggestions are broad, only semi-concrete policies that are general enough to be applied to almost every country in the world: increase prenatal care, increase early education and provide free elementary and secondary school for all children. The report suggests cleaning up slums, supplying clean water for everyone, and giving people around the world health insurance and unemployment insurance. And it recommends doing a better job overall of measuring health disparities in the first place...
These demands are, in a word, steep. But the report authors do not feel they are unreasonable. "Health equity within a generation is achievable, it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it," they write. Like any persuasive call to arms, the report is peppered with success stories: Marmot cites the national pension plan in Botswana, which shows that even poor nations manage to provide income security to their elderly; and an Indian rural employment guarantee, which assures workers a minimum number of days of paid manual labor for the state, demonstrating that...