March 05, 2012 | News | New Publication
Mortality and Causes of Death in Ukraine
MPIDR researcher Vladimir Shkolnikov together with his two French colleagues France Meslé and Jacques Vallin has published a book about life expectancy and causes of death in Ukraine, with contributions of Serhii Pyrozhkov and Serguei Adamets. The book traces a century of European history.
The book is following another book, in which the data for Russia has been published. The researchers will continue their work and analyze in the next step the data for the Baltic states.
“Analyses of mortality trends especially trends by causes of death are crucial for understanding nature of problems faced by health systems, says Vladimir Shkolnikov. “These data are the most reliable and informative source authorities may use for improvement of these systems.”
Some of these data have never been published before, as they have not been accessible for research. In Soviet times they have been kept under lock and key – for political reasons. They show that life expectancy in former USSR lag far behind the figures of the Western countries which showed a positive trend. Only after Glasnost and the opening of the country, the archives have been opened to the scientists.
“Even in the Soviet time, differences in epidemiological profiles existed between the republics of the USSR. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, each country implemented their own health policies including organization of health care services, campaigns to reduce risk factors such as alcohol and tobacco, which resulted in different trends in life expectancy and mortality by causes of death”, says France Meslé, one of the editors of the book.
The book is tracing nearby a century of Ukrainian and Russian history. Providing estimates of Ukrainian population losses due to 1933 Great famine and to World War 2, it gives annual trends in life expectancy since the mid-1920s.
The authors examined some of the trends in the data and were able to show that some of the neat increase in life expectancy can be related to specific health programs. So, the anti-alcohol campaign initiated by former USSR president Michael Gorbachev at the beginning of his term of office, had a clearly positive, but short, effect on the average life-expectancy.
Surprisingly the nuclear accident of Tchernobyl had apparently no effect on the mortality in Ukraine. “Paradoxically, some improvement in cancer mortality among children, observed at the end of the 1980s, is probably the consequence of a better cancer screening, that has been started after the catastrophe”, says France Meslé. More children were attained by a cancer disease, such as thyroid cancer, but these cancers have been detected in the large scale medical screenings and mainly treated successfully.
Also the economic crisis, which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transition to market economy resulted in a significant decline of life expectancy.
More Information
Mortality and causes of death in 20th-century Ukraine, Meslé, F., Vallin, J. (Eds.), Demographic Research Monographs 9, 279 pages. Dordrecht [et al.], Springer (2012)