WS MoreOrLess: Measuring World Health
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Moore. On this week's programme, we'll be returning to the subject of sleep. But first, a claim from UK newspaper The Telegraph caught my eye recently.
Babies born in the poorest parts of the UK today have worse prospects for a long and healthy life than those born in Rwanda.
Is that true? Wesley Stevenson's here to help me explain.
Right, well, this claim seems surprising considering the two countries' comparative wealth. The UK is one of the world's richest countries, the sixth richest according to data from the World Bank, while Rwanda in Central Africa is one of the poorest.
The Telegraph article compares figures for England, not the whole of the UK as the headline suggests, from the Office for National Statistics with World Health Organization figures for Rwanda. These show that a baby born into the most deprived 10% of England can expect to live to 76. A baby born in Rwanda will, on average, live to 65.
So, as you can tell, life expectancy is better in England, even the most deprived parts, than it is in Rwanda as a whole. But the headline's a little bit more subtle than that. What it says is that babies born in the poorest parts of the UK today have worse prospects for a long and healthy life than those born in Rwanda. So it's not talking about how long people live, but how long people live in good health.
The ONS says people in the bottom 10% of England will spend on average 52 of their 76 years in good health. But a baby born into the top 10% could expect to live for 71 years in good health. It's pretty startling that there's a 19-year gap between the highest and lowest health expectancy.
Yes. astonishing really isn't it and the telegraph goes on to tell us a baby born in Rwanda today can expect to live 55 years in good health and remember it's 52 years for the most deprived in England.
There are, of course, areas of real deprivation in the UK, where deaths from poverty-related illnesses such as stroke and coronary heart disease are high. But can it be true that living in one of those areas, in a developed country with universal healthcare, will kill you faster on average than living in Rwanda?
Well, as you may have guessed, there's a problem with how The Telegraph has used its figures. It's lumped together two different data sets, the figures for England from the Office for National Statistics and World Health Organisation figures for Rwanda. And those two organisations have different ways of measuring what healthy life expectancy actually means.
Professor David Gordon is Director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at Bristol University in the UK.
The healthy life expectancy is how long people will live before they're likely to become disabled or have a chronic disease. And of course, the way this is measured will vary from country to country. In the UK, we know how many people are born, how many people die, when they die, and more or less what they died of.
Did a Telegraph headline really claim babies in deprived England have worse healthy lives than those in Rwanda?
In poor countries like Rwanda, unfortunately, they don't have such comprehensive information. So there's no developing country which has a comprehensive register of the causes of child death, for example. Many children become sick and die, and they're never recorded on any official documents. And therefore, in order to measure healthy life expectancy in a country like Rwanda, where all the necessary data aren't available, a number of assumptions have to be made and what's called life tables are applied. And of course, depending on the assumptions you make, you can get somewhat different results.
And it's not just about recording when people were born and when they died, is it? There's a survey data as well.
It's also getting an estimate from the population of how many people are sick and disabled. And that uses a series of three questions in the European Union, which have been harmonised across all 28 European countries.
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