Austerity is Devastating our Health

Austerity is seriously bad for health, claim the Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, on the basis of their decade-long research.

Their work published in a book suggests that over 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression were diagnosed during the "Great Recession". In Greece, the lowered HIV prevention budgets have been coinciding with the rates of the AIDS-causing virus. The rates of the AIDS-causing virus have been rising by more than 200 percent since 2011, with increased drug abuse and 50 percent youth unemployment rate. Greece had its first malaria outbreak in decades after budget of mosquito-spraying programmes have been cut.

Over five million Americans lost access to healthcare services during the latest recession, and 10,000 Briton families were pushed back with homelessness by the government's austerity budget.

Austerity is having a devastating effect; 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.

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