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Study: Australian Aborigines die younger than other indigenous populations

April 27, 2004 - MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) - Australian Aborigines are dying much younger than indigenous people in the United States, Canada and New Zealand, a study by Canada's University of Western Ontario revealed Tuesday.

According to the research presented at the World Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education in the southern city of Melbourne, the life expectancy of Aborigines is more than 10 years lower than the indigenous people of the other three developed Western countries.

Aboriginal life expectancy was 59.6 years at birth, the study found.

Canada's indigenous community had the highest life expectancy of 72.9 years, followed by New Zealand's Maori at 72.1 and the United States at 70.6, according to the study.

Studies in Australia of the country's 400,000 Aborigines have showed they have a life expectancy well below that of the rest of the 20 million population. Aborigines also have higher levels of unemployment and imprisonment.

The research, which used census data between 1991 to 2001, ranked the well-being of indigenous people in the four countries by comparing them in three areas - life expectancy, education and income.

The study's author Martin Cooke said the research found all four countries had room for improvement.

"We were interested in seeing whether other countries were experiencing the same levels of disparity as Canada's Aboriginal people were," he said. "In all four of these countries the situation is not good."

The study also found that just because the overall standard of living improved in a country, it did not necessary extend to their indigenous community.

The World Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education involves health experts from more than 90 countries who will give more than 2,000 separate presentations in Melbourne this week.

Source: Associated Press

Life of Aborigines second worst on earth

By Andra Jackson

April 28, 2004 - The quality of life of Australia's Aborigines is the second worst on the planet, according to a Canadian study of 100 countries.

Only China performed worse, according to a United Nations index that measures human development.

Australia, however, ranked fourth after Norway, Iceland and Sweden on the level of human development accorded its general population.

The human development measure was compiled from three other measurements - educational attainment, life expectancy at birth and median income levels, researcher Martin Cook said.

The findings were presented to the 18th World Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education in Melbourne yesterday.

Mr Cook, who is a PhD student in sociology at the Western Ontario University, said the index "is a simple blunt measurement that hides a lot of complexities".

The study also compared the development of Canada's Inuit, New Zealand Maori, America's Indians and Australia's Aborigines over the past decade.

"Australia didn't fare best in any of the individual measurements on levels on education attainment, life expectancy and the income gap between indigenous and non-indigenous populations, and it was clearly the worst on overall human development," Mr Cook said yesterday.

It tracked indigenes' progress from the 1990s to 2001 using census data and life-expectancy estimates. It found Australia had the highest gap in educational attainment between its indigenous and non-indigenous population. It also showed that during that decade the educational gap between the two groups in Australia widened even further.

The gap in life expectancy between the indigenous and non-indigenous in Australia was the widest of the four countries examined.

Mr Cook said the message from the study was that "we should not be complacent, the gaps can increase between indigenous and non-indigenous people even when the overall development levels of a country are increasing".

Source: The Age

The rich live 5 years longer

26 February, 2004 - A new report reinforces the long-held view that rich people tend to live longer, healthier lives than the middle class and low-income Canadians.

The top 20 per cent of income earners in Canada live, on average, about five years longer than the lowest 20 per cent, according to a new report.

And aboriginals, consistently among the poorest of the poor, fare even worse: They can expect to live, on average, 10 years less than a non-native, and infant mortality rates in Indian and Inuit communities are three times the national average.

The wealthy are also considerably less likely to suffer from heart disease, to be injured, and to spend time in hospital, a new report released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information reveals. "There's a very strong health-to-wealth link," Jennifer Zelmer, vice-president of research and analysis at CIHI, said in an interview, inform GlobeAndMail

The report found that while Aboriginal peoples are making some health gains, they still live shorter lives and have higher suicide rates. Aboriginal peoples have three times the rate of diabetes and 16 times the rate of tuberculosis than other Canadians. Obesity rates among children have skyrocketed over the last two decades, though they appear to have stabilized in the last few years, the report says. It also found that income seems to affect obesity rates in adults. The risk of being overweight or obese rose among affluent men. Among affluent women, however, author Tom Wolfe's stereotype of the "social X-ray" seems more apt; the better off, economically, a woman is, the less likely she is to be obese, report Canada.com

Source: Pravda

Further information:

• Health crisis: information and clippings
• The World Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education
• Measuring aboriginal well-being in four countries:
  An application of the UNDP’s human development index to aboriginal people in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia (Word document)
  

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