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** 17 September 2024
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** UK
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** Tackling UK ill health is vital to economic growth, says IPPR (#1)
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** Why Britain is one of the worst places to get cancer in Europe (#2)
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** International
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** EU wants to ban smoking and vaping in outdoor areas, leaked draft says (#3)
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** UK
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** Tackling UK ill health is vital to economic growth, says IPPR
Tackling Britain’s growing ill-health crisis holds the key to increasing growth and the government needs to invest £15bn a year on a radical programme of reforms designed to improve wellbeing and national prosperity, a left-of-centre thinktank has said.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said the UK’s worsening health was affecting the supply of workers, worsening productivity, holding back pay, damaging the public finances and adding to regional inequality.
The final report of the thinktank’s three-year commission on health and prosperity said the 900,000 people lost to the labour force since the pandemic would cost HMRC £5bn in lost revenue this year, while better health would save the government £18bn a year by the mid-2030s.
The IPPR said: “The term the ‘sick man of Europe’ is often used to describe countries going through severe economic turmoil or social unrest. In Britain today, it has become a more literal reality.
“We lag our peers on health outcomes, the number of people with a long-term condition is rising, and people are spending longer proportions of their lives in poor health.”
The report – welcomed by the health and social care secretary, Wes Streeting – called for among other things: Higher taxes on tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food companies to raise more than £10bn a year by the end of the parliament.
Of the leading industrial nations in the G7, the UK ranked sixth for life expectancy, health spending and avoidable mortality, and fifth for children living in relative poverty. More than a quarter of people were obese, six times higher than in Japan.
According to the IPPR report, if current trends continue, economic inactivity caused by sickness could hit 4.3 million by the end of this parliament, up from 2.8 million now.
Source: The Guardian, 17 September 2024
See also: The Institute for Public Policy Research - Our greatest asset: The final report of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity ([link removed])
Editorial note: One of the key asks in the report is for the government to adopt a polluter pays approach to fund prevention and create market incentives for business to move away from the sale of unhealthy products. See the ASH response here: Health Commission backs call for a polluter pays levy on tobacco manufacturers ([link removed])
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** Why Britain is one of the worst places to get cancer in Europe
It’s a worrying trend that shows no sign of abating: cancer rates across the UK are on the rise, having shot up by 13 per cent in the past 25 years.
More worrying still is that, according to Cancer Research UK, the biggest rise is among the under-50s, among whom cases rose by 24 per cent between 1995 and 2019. This isn’t solely a UK trend. Across Europe, cancer rates among those of all ages have risen on average almost 50 per cent in the past two decades.
In fact, despite forming less than a tenth of the world’s population, Europeans around 750 million people account for about a quarter of all global cancer cases. But while the incidence of cancer seems to be a problem shared with the rise largely due to ageing populations and increasingly unhealthy lifestyles the fate of those who develop cancer varies greatly from country to country.
A Good Health investigation has found that the UK frequently dubbed the ‘sick man of Europe’ ranks as one of the poorest performers compared with its continental neighbours, with reports showing its cancer survival rates lag way behind many others. The report blamed long waits for treatment and a failure to properly tackle the causes of cancer from obesity to couch potato lifestyles and smoking.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths to affect both men and women and is the deadliest cancer worldwide. As a metric of cancer care, the UK’s five-year lung cancer survival rate at just 13.3 per cent is the worst of all the eight countries we studied and is lower than the rate was in Sweden a quarter of a century ago (Sweden’s rate is now nearly 20 per cent).
‘We take longer to deliver treatment, deliver less treatment and, in some cases, deliver it less well,’ says Dr John Butler, lead clinical adviser of the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, which studies how countries across the world perform.
Cancer cases in the UK are more likely to be diagnosed at a later stage, too when chances of survival are lower and studies show UK patients often wait up to five weeks longer to start treatment than those in Norway, for instance.
And it’s the only country of the eight without a national cancer plan, after the National Cancer Control Plan in England and Wales was scrapped last year and subsumed by a wider ‘major conditions strategy’ which covers multiple conditions.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care told Good Health it plans to ‘hit all NHS cancer waiting times and early diagnosis targets’ within five years and double the number of MRI and CT scanners but stopped short of committing to a national cancer plan.
‘We have inherited a broken NHS. Too many cancer patients are waiting too long for treatment and we are determined to change that,’ the spokesman added.
Source: Daily Mail, 17 September 2024
See also: The Institute for Public Policy Research - Our greatest asset: The final report of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity ([link removed]) | Cancer research UK - Cancer rates rising in under-50s ([link removed])
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Read Here ([link removed])
** International
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** EU wants to ban smoking and vaping in outdoor areas, leaked draft says
The European Commission will recommend smoking bans in cafe terraces, bus stops, and zoos, and plans also cover nicotine-free products, according to a leaked document obtained by Euronews. The plans, set to be adopted by the EU executive on Tuesday, would expand current 2009 guidelines intended to cut exposure to second-hand smoke in public places, workplaces, and public transport.
The latest version of the draft – seen by Euronews and still subject to change – seeks to clear public spaces of all aerosols, not just cigarette smoke, reflecting growing concerns over the health risks posed by new tobacco products such as vapes.
The guidelines aren’t legally binding, but provide a framework for member states to follow as part of wider efforts to curb tobacco-related cancer. The Commission claims the first few years of implementation in 2009-2012 already saw a drop in exposure.
The Commission's new recommendations aim to tackle a broader range of emerging products, including “heated tobacco products and electronic cigarettes, whether containing nicotine or nicotine-free.” Likewise, the Commission wants to include “tobacco surrogates and any other smoke and/or aerosol emitting products” too, the leaked document shows.
A key feature of the proposal is the extension of smoking bans to various outdoor spaces, which has so far been regulated case-by-case in individual member states. The Commission’s proposal, originally planned for January, has been delayed, raising concerns about the EU’s commitment to its anti-tobacco agenda.
A linked reform to the EU’s Tobacco Taxation Directive has now also been pushed to 2025, and some have questioned whether the tobacco industry influenced those decisions. In a December 2023 report, the EU Ombudsman criticised the Commission for failing to disclose meetings with tobacco industry lobbyists.
Despite these setbacks, outgoing Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides appears set to update the Council recommendations tomorrow, just weeks before the end of the Commission term.
The revised guidelines are part of the Commission’s larger Beating Cancer Plan, which aims to achieve a "tobacco-free generation" by 2040, to cut tobacco use by 30% by 2025, and to see the share of the EU population smoking cut to just 5%.
Source: EuroNews, 16 September 2024
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