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I saw people touching on this topic on the Healthy life expectancy thread today
There's an absolutely huge gap in healthy life expectancy depending on where you are born, from Orkney Islands (77.5 years) to North Ayrshire (54.0 years). Orkney Islands seems to be an outlier, although several places in the South-east have 70+ HLE:
What I'm curious about is how much moving somewhere else can affect your health. HLE seems to be measured from birth. So I would assume that a lot of it is just that richer people in richer areas can afford better lifestyles and opportunities for their children.
Does anyone have experiences of moving to a different area and it having a noticeable effect on their health (and therefore their longevity)?
Overlay the dark bits (low LE) of that map with historic UK coal mines.
Life expectancy at birth today is unrelated to a mine closed in the 80's, but how can they know?
I think it’s starts with deprivation as a direct cause. Higher stress and poor diet and can be directly caused by lower income. Or at least be more likely With low income.
Then there are direct environmental factors. I suspect that many deprived urban areas have poor air quality. Living in a high crime area can make your health worse. We moved our inlaws from rough urban fringe to our well off town. They both started going out more as it wasn’t scary. More excercise more social contact, better health.
Many services are funded per head not in the basis of need. So health services in areas of poor health are more stretched.
Finally there are the issues of culture. Which i think can lead to poor health in an area. If everyone in your area has the same poor diet that feels normal, it’s less pressure to change.
There was an interesting map of life expectancy, including healthy life expectancy, made by Manchester University a while back (10 years!). It uses ONS data and the tram network to create a map of deprivation and life expectancy. It is necessarily crude as some areas may be ‘generally’ deprived but the tram stop there may also serve wealthier enclaves. Still, interesting project. I wonder if they plan to update it?
BLOG.POLICY.MANCHESTER.AC.UK Also, mad stuff like this:
When I left school (late 80's) I worked on the chemical plants on the Mersey estuary. By miles the biggest employer in the surrounding areas. Everyone used to retire in their early/mid 50's on handsome pensions, but as the running refrain/dark joke went on the plants (because it was true) "yeah, but not many of them see 60"
Also, mad stuff like this:
That's interesting. in conversations with our allotment committee about elevated lead. so far up to 10x the C4SL value for allotments. some literature digging and it does seem to be known, at least should be by the council, though it's a private site and has been for 100 years. That probably doesn't help it, gifted as a workers gardens in the 1920's, allotment practice was to commonly amend soils with ash, which combined with naturally elevated concentrations didn't help. plus old lead paint for sheds etc. I had a word with them a few weeks back about asbestos on the site too, but this seems far worse.
Just waiting to see what the council knew, and if they have taken a position on it, or recommend something else (like further site investigation and risk assessment, or at the least, recommendations for using the space for growing).
That said, life expectancy in Glasgow is much lower than it should be given the population demographic, level of deprived areas..the 'glasgow effect' Fascinating subject, with some academics relating it to inherent sense of oppression, combined with Irish immigration, dehumanisation and social divide.