Russia would be better off if it sold its Tu-160s to the Confederate Air Force
and used the money to buy medicines:

AIHA's CommonHealth

What does the coming decade hold for the New Independent States?

"Demograhically the outlook is bleak. I expect population growth to decline and
possibly even become negative over the next few years, in virtually all of the
former Republics. Although it is difficult to generalize, several factors
contribute to this trend.

First, and most visibly, is the military unrest in several regions and the
attendant emigration patterns....

Second, my gloomy projections reflect disturbing decreases in life expectancy,
and equally troubling increases in infant mortality. Moreover, abortions
continue at a high level, often causing secondary infections and infertility.
Thus in many regions of Russia and Ukraine, crude death rates now exceed crude
birth rates....

In part these patterns reflect the third notable factor in NIS demographic
trends: dramatic increases in childhood diseases. For example, Moscow, which
has a population of 9 million, recorded an astonishing 46 cases of diphtheria
in 1988, 94 in 1989, 688 in 1990, and 1,100 in 1991. The 1991 incidence of
diphtheria in Moscow (12.5 per 100,000) was more than 7, 000 times the rate in
the US (.0016 per 100,000). Stated another way, if the incidence of diphtheria
in the US were the same as it is in Moscow, diphtheria would strike 30,500
Americans each year.

Tragically, we can also expect these remarkable numbers to climb in the NIS,
because immunization levels in the NIS are much below the minimum considered
necessary to prevent an epidemic. Current global standards define that level as
90 percent (although Soviet sources usually referred to 95 percent as the
necessary epidemic-prevention level). For the NIS as a whole, immunization
levels are below 80 percent. In Russia, those rates hovered near 65 percent; in
Uzbekistan they run as low as 40 percent.

All of these conditions have been aggravated by long decades of environmental
degradation. For example, 70 million persons in the NIS currently live in
cities where air pollutants exceed Maximum Pollution Concentration levels (the
"PDK") by five times: 50 million reside in cities where pollutants exceed the
PDK by ten times or more. In general, each five-fold increase in pollution
rates over the PDK represents a doubling in the illness rate. Surface water and
land contamination throughout the NIS pose analogous problems.

Perhaps the single most important environmental factor now under study is
radioactivity. Chernobyl's release of 50 million curies is minor compared to
the release of radioactivity by military testing in Chelyabinsk,
Sami-Palatinsk, and the Northern Seas, or the release of radioactivity by
civilian nuclear explosions throughout the entire country. I believe that this
radioactivity is related to the sharply rise in birth defects and deformities
throughout the former Soviet Union. It also offers an explanation for why life
expectancies are so low (45 to 50 years at birth) in areas such as the northern
tier of Russia and the Urals. All of these factors contribute to relatively low
life expectancy throughout the NIS.

The current situation is greatly aggravated by the state of the health care
system in the NIS. Medicines are in such short supply that a leading Russian
physician told the Moscow Medical Society that the expects 1.5 million excess
deaths in Russia this year due solely to lack of medications -not including
shortages of bandages, single-use syringes and needles, electrocardiographs,
and other supplies and equipment.

There is no simple cure for this confluence of negative factors...."

Murray Feshbach is Research Professor of Demography at Georgetown University
(Washington, DC).


Chris Mark