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European Health Levels Suddenly Collapsed After 2003 and Nobody Is Sure Why
KentuckyFC writes "Europeans are living longer. But since 2003, they've suddenly enjoyed fewer years of healthy life. For example, in Italy between 1995 and 2003, life expectancy increased from 75 to 80.1 for men and from 81.8 to 85.3 for women. At the same time, the number of years of healthy life increased from 66.7 to 70.9 for men and from 70 to 74.4 for women. But since 2003, while life expectancy has increased further, the number of years of healthy living has plummeted to about 62 for both sexes. More worrying still is that demographers say the same trend has been repeated right across Europe. Only the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands appear to have escaped. That raises an obvious question: what happened in 2003? One idea is that the weather is to blame. In 2003, Europe experienced an extreme heat wave that led to some 80,000 extra deaths across the region. And the higher temperatures could also have triggered ill health, particularly in older people suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes. That has important implications for governments who have to pay for health costs in Europe. And it raises the possibility that climate change is already having a bigger impact on human health than anyone imagined."
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People get sick in the winter. Global warming will shorten winter and the weather less cold, therefore less people will get sick!
See, I can speculate wildly too!
My guess would be that they are just following America's lead and are becoming fatter.
The article even says:
And yet this increasing lifespan masks a dark secret. Many developed countries are suffering an epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease thanks to poor diets and sedentary lifestyles. The numbers are such that they must inevitably influence the health of nations as a whole but by how much?
Then the authors go on to blame it on the weather.
In Europe old people don't expect the Spanish Inquisition :-)
Rather than conclude that the heat wave is the culprit, first find some comparative events. Its not like there is a historical shortage of heat waves to use to validate the theory, yet there seems to have been no attempt to do so mentioned.
How about the austerity measures, put into place across Europe. Perhaps the stress countries are coming under is spreading to peoples health to the point were it is a negative response. Happy people live longer and in many EU countries, people are not happy.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/1746222/bbc-amazon-workers-face-increased-risk-of-mental-illness
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
This has to all be Barak Obama's fault, personally. There is no other possible explanation.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Screw it. It's too hot to go outside we'll stay inside and eat. I know that most older people that I know start going downhill quickly when they stop moving.
... of less healthy people, who probably experienced more malnutrition and disease in childhood, might explain it.
More likely it's just a bug in the survey's methodology.
The article lists Sweden among the countries where the years of health are going down, but when you look at the graph for individual countries, Sweden has a strong positive trend, and does not go down significantly in any year. Is that an error, or have I missed something?
On a side note, the article is confusing "Europe" with "The European Union". They aren't the same thing, especially when making statements like "Only the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands appear to have escaped". They didn't consider Iceland, Norway, Switzerland or any of the eastern european countries, for example. (Also, France is among those considered, and also doesn't seem to be declining).
Finally, the study is based on interview subjects' own perception of their health, and so might be affected by news reporing on health or other psychologial effects. But it is definitely an interesting result they've found.
No more fun?
(More seriously maybe economic impacts?)
We have cellphones and wifi in the UK, and I'm pretty sure they have them in the Netherlands too ;)
which is totally what she said
Chernobyl kicking in.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
This has been posted on here before, so I'm kind of just karma whoring, but I have long suspected, and explained to others, that this idea that we can all work until we're 70 or 75 because we'll live to 100 for this generation is bullshit, a scam to keep us grinding along and working until we drop dead. I say that with all the technological advances we've made in the last 50 years we may have less of an idea of what much of it does to the body than we think. it might not be making for a good quality of life at advanced age.
We may be living longer, but what I feel I am seeing in older people is that some of them are quite unhappy with how they feel. Then again, others say anything is better than being dead.
Thoughts?
Whew, is it hot in here or is it just me?
-
easy question
lots of immigration into europe. and if they eat anything like my russian in laws this explains everything
the russians eat too much carbs. the only people on the planet to eat pasta and bread and potatoes together. and then they wonder why they get diabetes
What has Europe's immigration levels been over this time period? Has the increase in deaths occurred in immigrants from Africa and Central Asia? If so, the median age of the decedents could be in line with what is typical for their country of original but younger than that of the native European population.
Is the cause in 2003 or is it a delayed cause from a decade, two decades or even eighty years ago?
the disease of Capitalism is setting in. :)
You can't jump to conclusions about the weather. The thing about France is telling. They didn't drop until 2006, and I remember hearing some truly awful things about what the heat did to the elderly there. If I had to guess, I'd say that some change in government policy had something to do with it. UK is not as strongly tied to Europe. Some of these other countries are tied in economic union; but they are still sovereign. Perhaps France was able to provide good retirement benefits just a bit longer. That would be the first place I'd look--the impact of government policies that impact the elderly. If you suddenly have to take an early retirement and aren't getting the same benefits that will impact your lifestyle.
Government policy impact does a better job of explaining discrepancies between countries, the sudden change, and why some are not affected even though they share a similar climate.
Of course my speculation is no better than theirs. The people that are getting paid to do this need to go back and analyze their data some more.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It was the excessive hand-wringing that shortened their lifespans.
Europe has only been practicing "Fake Austerity'"
Real austerity is cutting government spending until it matches receipts. This hasn't been tried outside of the Baltic states.
"We are told that austerity in Europe has failed. The elections in France and Greece, for instance, are supposedly evidence of people’s opposition to severe cuts in spending. However, the growing anti-austerity backlash against Europe ignores one fundamental point: If there is austerity in Europe, in most cases it hasn’t taken the form of massive spending cuts.
"Following years of large spending expansion, Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece—countries widely cited for adopting austerity measures—haven’t significantly reduced spending since 'austerity' supposedly started in 2008."
Austerity hasn't failed in Europe, it's been declared difficult and left untried.
Could this be because it's easier to get diagnosed with diabetes, COPD, or other non-healthy conditions than it was in 2002? I've heard enough anecdotal evidence to make me ask the question, but it would be nice to see a study. How many people who were considered healthy in 2002 could visit a doctor in 2013 and be declared unhealthy, and how does that fraction vary by country? Unless an article can control for that variable, the other numbers don't really mean much.
Millions of years. Actually, billions of them.
So since that hasn't changed much, this "winter season" thingy you're proposing, I suspect it isn't the cause here.
And the heatwaves and deaths of 80,000 people isn't "speculate[ing] wildly" you misanthropic piece of shit.
Try again, sonny.
More and more of electronic pollution? Mire wifi usage, more cellphones + more upper gigahertz traffic (G2, G3, G4)?
Imbalanced chakras? Cold and squared audio output from transistor amps? The decline of the department store?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Medical technology keeping unhealthy people alive far longer than it used to....
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/11/26/1511238/why-scott-adams-wished-death-on-his-dad
love is just extroverted narcissism
Could it be related to The Great Depression? Somebody who lived until they were 85, and died between 2003 and 2013 would have been born between 1918 and 1928. Basically, they would have been quite young during the great depression. I wonder if something like this could have big effects so much later in life. It's mostly likely that, or possibly that a lot of them ended up being veterans of the war, as they would have been around 15-25 years old when the second world war was going on. I'm sure there's some very reasonable explanation why this group of people aren't living so many healthy years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
...is what happened in 2010 to cause the even larger spike upward, and why did it reverse itself.
I bet its food quality. The quality of our food has gone down as we try to get more and more off the land. Health care has gotten better though.
So people are staying alive longer but are less healthy.
This paper is in its infancy. It is somewhat garbled, the methods don't really specify the methods.
The methods are basically "we graphed mortality over time". But you can't really criticize it much,
because it is not published, and probably not submitted yet. The only question is why did it get to slashdot?
The most likely explanation for the effect at this stage is some kind of error. Either in the calculation,
or as the authors point out, in the wording of the questions (which probably would be a good idea to
test before this paper is published ?)
"Standardized translations of the questionnaire have been used; nevertheless it is likely that linguistic or cultural differences, as well as changes in the wording of questions, have influenced the way the respondents indicate a longstanding health problem or disability and their way of communicating the types of restrictions caused by this problem"
Or, in the population measured (migration from East-Block countries?) or many other possible problems.
All these I'd bet much higher chances than a real health effect.
There have been a number of 'adjustments; in the healthcare world about what to consider 'good health' et al. This is likely an artifact of this. Particularly when the differential can be identified by national borders.
So what else happened to the European Union after 2003? Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary joined the E.U. in 2004. These countries have huge numbers of elderly people in relatively poor health as a result of mediocre Warsaw Pact health and nutrition. This will obviously lower the overall health of the EU average, but I'm willing to bet a bunch of them migrated to other EU countries and depressed the stats for individual nations.
Don't think I'm arguing against immigration here: the effect is to increase the health of the European continent overall, which is a good thing.
it's probably car accidents. since 2003 the car ownership rate has skyrocketed. there was a jump that year due to a change in import/export control laws.
Whatever you do don't put the blame on you blame it on the rain yeah yeah. Cuz the rain don't mind and the rain don't care.
probably the population is getting older as a result so the numbers go down since 2003
Denmark and the Netherlands have tall people, which offsets the effect of low altitude
GMO's? Thought they were banned in the EU.
In fact some scientists are now saying the EU policy toward GMOs is harmful to the overall population quality of crops, agriculture and is leading to more rapid deterioration of the environment in Europe.
http://www.euractiv.com/science-policymaking/chief-eu-scientist-backs-damning-news-530693
Interesting thought anyway.
...Windows 2003 Server
Did they choke on their own smug?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So the socialized health care that's been running for decades has just recently reduced European health outcomes to only 20% better
Well that's pretty ballsy to claim it's better at all in a story that mentions they are living worse.
Obviously the health care is sucking quite a bit more if their actual life is worse off health wise, the only metric that matters.
BTW I am 20% smarter than you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and if your tea party then grammar is optional.
and if you're tea party then grammar is optional. (Fixed that for you)
Apparently, if you're a /.er, grammar is optional.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
People live in all kinds of climates so that seems like a stretch to me.
However since 2003 there have been two significant changes in the food chain.
GMOs have become prevalent thruout the food chain.
Neonicotinoid pesticides have become widely used.
But that doesn't explain the results in the UK, Netherlands and Denmark.
Gee, what officially has NOT been occuring for the past decade?? Here's a hint: the forums are full of shills who'll be glad to reassure you that it's not actually happening, regardless of what you think you see (so STFU and look back down at the ground).
Didn't the War in Iraq start in 2003? How many of these nations were in the coalition of the willing? This could be war weariness.
And conclude that the article has very little science value at all, and does not warrant any conclusion.
and drinking American beer.
I thought drinking water was generally considered to be good for your health.
CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!
How could it possibly be anything else?
...Steve
2003 - 62 = 1941
So people who were born in Europe around WWII are now showing poor health?
Could it had something to do with the few million tons of bombs dropped, or rather the chemicals put in the atmosphere from the TNT etc components as well as the materials burned on the ground.
I wasn't there, so I can't say if the general population could have been experiencing some stress at that time that was later reflected in their children's health.
All the H1B programmers that had been hired to work on Y2K returned to Europe, bringing with them the North American diet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works."
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"
which as near as I can tell is code for Wealth Inequality. Around 2003 the rich made a major money grab, netting the biggest gains in history while saddling everyone else with massive debt. You've probably got a lot of Europeans putting in American style 60 hour (high stress) work weeks. They're also probably drinking more sugary caffeinated drinks to cope with the extra workload needed to keep their heads above water while their wages plummet.
So basically, cut peoples standard of living through a program of massive wealth transference to the top 1% and their life expectancies go down. Who knew?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's far more likely this is from austerity programs which have severely impacted the working poor and national health systems, to enrich the ultra-rich.
You can see it just by looking at the age differentials between the US and Canada - in Canada males live as long as females do now, about 10 years longer than US - originally both countries had about the same male/female disparity and the same lifespan.
Pretty obvious when you examine the underlying IHME stats.
(do the work yourself, there's this thing called google if you can't figure out what a search is)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
McDonalds.. The American fast food chains started pushing HARD across europe.
The Herpes that is american fast food is spreading across the planet.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
warming actually makes it easier for animals to live, it is allowing species to move farther north than ever before. so Global warming would make it a LOT easier for humans. A lot of people die in winters even today, so a warmer winter and summer makes your chances of living higher.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That has important implications for governments who have to pay for health costs in Europe.
Government does not pay health costs. Citizen do through taxes, or insured people do through fees.
is that nobody wants this to be true simply because all your favourite toys are suddenly the problem.
time will have to tell, i guess.
I applaud your effort to bring actual data to the discussion, but I'm not certain those links support your claim of temperatures "equal to or higher than todays". Closest I could find in the first paper was:
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
(emphasis mine) ... but we know global temperatures have risen significantly in the last 60 years. Do you have evidence that this is not the case in Europe?
The second link was paywalled, but the abstract says northern Sweden experienced "similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century". Hard to pin down the comparison dates, but again, not "equal or higher than today".
The third link says that some reconstructions of northern Sweden and Finland specifically have indeed been up to 0.6C warmer 2000 years ago, when compared to the 1951-1980 mean (rather than today's warmer temperatures), but also says that proxy reconstructions can vary wildly, by 1.5-3C, depending on which Scandinavian record is used, and finishes with:
We conclude that the temperature history of the last millenium is much less understood than often suggested, and that the regional and particularly the hemispheric scale pre-1400 temperature variance is largely unknown.
So basically, it was certainly fairly warm in Europe during certain past periods, but the evidence is not reliable enough to say exactly how warm, and no paper supports the claim that it's "equal or higher than todays" temperatures. In any case, Europe in general (and Sweden/Finland in particular) are only one part of the global picture; temperatures were relatively low elsewhere in the world even during the MWP.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Feng shui is out of balance with respect to how we control the natural energies of the universe. So yes, squared audio output from transistor amps could be the cause of it. As for the decline in department stores; the 80s need to be brought back with copious amounts of Prince and Duran Duran played in rotation.
Now start meditating to the harmonious Earth mother and cleanse your body of ill toxins. ***paying new-age music with whale sound recordings***
Life is not for the lazy.
So live expectancy is up but "the number of years of healthy living" is down... Well, maybe because, people are diagnosed earlier, especially diabetes also stress and depression are much more "popular" than used to be...
:)
Better healthcare could explain it
warming actually makes it easier for animals to live, it is allowing species to move farther north than ever before...
That works real well if you disregard the animals already living there who were adapted to the cold climate and now have nowhere to go.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
They're probably blaming the Jews.
Yes, something along that lines. Maybe they changed the definition of 'Healthy Life Years Expectancy'. This would have a huge impact on the figures.
"The European Union approved the use of paraquat in 2004. Subsequently Sweden, supported by Denmark, Austria, and Finland, brought the European Union commission to court. In 2007, the court annulled the directive authorizing paraquat as an active plant protection substance."
"It is also toxic to human beings and animals. Research has shown that it is linked to development of Parkinson's disease."
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris