How will the financial crisis affect health?

doi:10.1136/bmj.b1314

Published 1 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1314
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1314

Feature

How will the financial crisis affect health?

M G Marmot, director of the International Institute for Society and Health, Ruth Bell, senior research fellow

¹ Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, London WC1E 6BT

Correspondence to: M G Marmot m.marmot@ucl.ac.uk

Global recession is likely to damage our health as well as ourwealth, but it also offers an opportunity to build a more equitableeconomic model as Michael Marmot and Ruth Bell explain in lightof the G20 summit

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The financial crisis intrudes daily from the newspapers. Thebreakfast table is littered with quantitative easing and credit-defaultswaps, stimulus packages, and bank bailouts. But is there alink between the financial crisis dominating the front pageand the health stories on the inside? The Commission on SocialDeterminants of Health certainly believed so. Its starting pointwas that the economic and social features of society are closelylinked to the distribution of health within and between countries.¹The social determinants of health are the circumstances of dailylife—the conditions in which people are born, grow, live,work, and age—and the structural drivers of those conditions(unfair distribution of power, money, and resources). Both theconditions of daily life and the structural drivers will beinfluenced by the financial crisis.

We cannot improve the living conditions of people who are relativelydisadvantaged without money. For example, globally, nearly 1billion . . . [Full text of this article]

Add to CiteULike CiteULike Add to Complore Complore Add to Connotea Connotea Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us Add to Digg Digg Add to Reddit Reddit Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon Add to Technorati Technorati What's this?

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

The financial crisis is unhealthy for mental health too: Prem K Kunjukrishnan, et al.
bmj.com, 15 Apr 2009 [Full text]
Global healthcare after the financial crisis: Harald M Lipman
bmj.com, 15 Apr 2009 [Full text]
economic recession and suicide: Madhavan Seshadri
bmj.com, 11 May 2009 [Full text]