Reply #1: From the same link:

[inna]

Inequality's Death Toll: A New Calculation


How powerful an impact does inequality have on health? In the world’s top 30 industrial nations, the Japanese and American research team concludes, “upwards of 1.5 million deaths” — nearly 10 percent of total mortality in the age 15-to-60 age group — could be prevented by reducing income inequality.

The impact of inequality on the United States turns out to be even more stunning, not surprisingly since no developed nation sports wider gaps in income and wealth. Of the deaths the new BMJ study ties to inequality, almost 900,000 came in the United States.

Too Much last week asked a leading U.S. epidemiologist, Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of the Public Health, to place that calculation in perspective.

“We can say,” he noted, “that one in four deaths can be attributed to our high rates of income inequality.”

Such numbers have, of course, enormous political implications. An unequal society, as last week’s BMJ editorial noted, amounts to a “broken society.” Political leaders, the editorial continued, now need to repair that break — “by undoing the widening of inequalities that has taken place since the 1970s.”

Source:
Naoki Kondo, Grace Sembajwe, Ichiro Kawachi, Rob van Dam, S. V. Subramanian, and Zentaro Yamagata, Income inequality, mortality and self-rated health: meta-analysis of multilevel studies. BMJ, November 10, 2009.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, Greater equality and better health. BMJ editorial, November 10, 2009.


:wow: