Date: 17 September 2013
Source: Irish Times Health and Family Supplement (Written by Paul Cullen)
Money doesn’t buy happiness, they say, but the clear evidence is that it does buy you extra years of life. The flip side of this, of course, is that the poor experience the worst health outcomes and the shortest life expectancies.
Tackling this massive health inequality should be a main priority of governments because of the ethical issues involved, says world-renowned epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot, who has devoted his working life to the issue.
“There’s an intimate relationship between where you are on the social hierarchy and your health.
“The people at the top have the longest life, those in the middle are shorter, and as you get lower and lower, the life expectancy gets shorter and shorter,” he told The Irish Times on a visit to Dublin earlier this month.
‘Social gradient’
Marmot’s research has detailed the “social gradient” affecting the length of all our lives according to where we are on the economic pecking order.
In a 2010 report for the last Labour government in the UK, he found that people living in the poorest neighbourhoods died seven years earlier on average than those in the wealthiest neighbourhoods.
A number of Irish reports, including the 2008 all-island study by the Institute of Public Health and the more recent work by the Tasc think-tank, have pointed to similar trends here, yet it isn’t clear that the Government has got the message.
