Europeans face “lifelong health crises” as the region grapples with a growing mental health crisis among young people, stagnating immunization coverage and high rates of chronic diseases such as obesity and heart disease, according to a World Health Organization report published Tuesday.
At the same time, health systems are not ready for future health emergencies, strained under the growing threat of climate change and facing an aging population amid ongoing workforce shortages.
The WHO’s European Health Report, published every three years, looks at the state of health across the European region, which includes 53 countries in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
It found that one in six people in the region die before their 70th birthday from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes or chronic respiratory diseases.
“The entire region must confront the root causes of chronic disease, from tobacco and alcohol use to poor access to healthy and nutritious food, to air pollution, to a lack of physical activity,” said WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Henri Kluge in a statement.
The European region has the world’s highest alcohol intake, averaging 8.8 liters of pure alcohol per adult per year, with the EU recording the highest intake. Tobacco use remains “unacceptably high” at 25.3 percent and obesity, currently affecting a quarter of adults, is rising.
The report also found that infant mortality, though overall low in the region, varies greatly among countries and nearly 76,000 children die before their fifth birthday every year, usually due to preterm birth complications, birth asphyxia, congenital heart anomalies, lower respiratory infections, neonatal sepsis or other infections.
On top of this, routine vaccination rates are stagnating, which is leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases. For example, measles cases across 41 WHO Europe member countries saw a 30-fold increase in 2023 compared with the previous year, with 58,000 measles cases.
Poor mental health is also a growing trend among children and teenagers. One in five teenagers in the region grapples with a mental health condition, with suicide being the leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds. Cyberbullying has also become a significant concern, affecting 15 percent of adolescents.
Unhealthy lifestyles are also a worrying trend, according to the report, with nearly one in three school-aged children overweight and one in eight living with obesity. And about 11 percent of teenagers used some form of tobacco products in 2022, including e-cigarettes.
The report shows “health linkages across the entire life cycle,” Kluge said. “A healthy child is more likely to grow into a healthy adolescent, a healthy adult and a healthy older person. This couldn’t be more crucial because for the first time ever, there are more people aged over 65 years than under 15 years in the European Region.”
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