Austerity is devastating health, say researchers

Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in both Europe and North America, driving suicide, depression, and infectious diseases and reducing access to medicine and care.

Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health.

In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to 1m cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the “Great Recession” and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

In Greece, moves such as cutting HIV prevention budgets have coincided with rates of the Aids-causing virus rising by more than 200% since 2011 — driven in part by increasing drug abuse in the context of a 50% youth unemployment rate.

Greece also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades following budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programmes. More than 5m Americans have lost access to healthcare during the latest recession, the researchers argue, while, in Britain, some 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government’s austerity budget.

“Our politicians need to take into account the serious — and in some cases profound — health consequences of economic choices,” said Dr Stuckler, a senior researcher at Oxford University and co-author of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.

“The harms we have found include HIV and malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, lost healthcare access, and an avoidable epidemic of alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide,” he said.

“Austerity is having a devastating effect.”

Previous studies by Dr Stuckler published in journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal have linked rising suicide rates in some parts of Europe to biting austerity measures, and found HIV epidemics to be spreading amid cutbacks to services for vulnerable people.

However, Dr Stuckler and Dr Basu said negative public health effects are not inevitable, even during the worst economic disasters. Using data from the Great Depression of the 1930s, post-communist Russia, and some examples of the current economic downturn, they say financial crises can be prevented from becoming epidemics — if governments respond effectively.

As an example, they say, Sweden’s active labour market programmes helped the numbers of suicides to fall during its recession, despite a big rise in unemployment.

Neighbouring countries with no such programmes saw large rises in suicides. During the Great Depression of the 1930s in the US, each extra $100 of relief spending from the American New Deal led to about 20 fewer deaths per 1,000 births, four fewer suicides per 100,000 people, and 18 fewer pneumonia deaths per 100,000 people.

“Ultimately what we show is that worsening health is not an inevitable consequence of economic recessions,” said Dr Basu. “It’s a political choice.”