Inequality (W8)

• forces of mortality including burdens of disease, limits to health care and level of exposure, impact the timing and manner of death. Determining the extend to which people are unable to live to their biological maximum age
• there is an overall consensus that death reduction is important and simple mechanisms can reduce this
• the demographic transition theory shows that the rapid fall of death rates in stage 2 is mostly due to falling child mortality
• addressing crisis mortality is about controlling diseases through public health measures and increasing the stability of food supply
• addressing child mortality can be achieved by access to maternal and neonatal care
• reducing poverty and the rate of its decline greatly impacts the rate of mortality decline due to greater access to health care and lower exposure risk
• deprivation of education, health and freedoms for girls greatly impacts mortality, due to child and maternal mortality
• HIV/AIDS epidemic had a significant effect on the rate of reduction of mortality in the 1980s
• neoliberal capitalism since the 1980s is much more about deregulation, privatisation and minimising the state
• the Washington consensus redirected spending from welfare to portfolios with high economic return and abolished barrier to foreign direct investment
• the structural adjustment programs lead many poor countries to have to reduce public expenditure particularly in healthcare, de-regulate their economies and devalued their currencies and open up to more Foreign Direct Investment
• SAPs reduced access to healthcare and increased child mortality
• increased interconnection has lead to increase risk to disease
• life expectancy at birth is the hypothetical average age of death of someone born in a particular year, it allows researchers to control for age to determine how factors are impacting mortality
• life expectancy in 1800 was 40, this is due to extremely high infant mortality, this does not mean there were no elderly, while the average age in 1800 was 29
• life expectancy in 1950 was polarised with many countries (Africa) still having short life expectancies
• life expectancy in 2015 is now around 82 years in Australia, but there are still large portions of the world below the target 70 years
• the distribution of death over age has changed, in 1990 child mortality was around 25% while in 2019 it is around 5%
• there are still geographical disparities between death rates
• the epidemiological transition: stage one - communicable diseases (environment), end stages - non-communicable disease (lifestyle and aging)
• the cause of death is switching from communicable to non-communicable disease over the years
• excess mortality = recorded deaths in a period - expected deaths in a period (The number of deaths from all causes that are above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’ conditions)
• when and how deaths occur are extremely important in highlighting inequality