On the heels of the Greek Health Ministry shuttering the country's outpatient clinic network for a month, researchers from the University of Cambridge have revealed evidence that the country's flailing economy is negatively impacting the health of its citizens. Austerity measures have seen Greece's health spending topping out at a minuscule 6% of the GDP, giving the country the dubious honor of having the lowest healthcare budget of all pre-2004 European Union members.
The Mediterranean nation was severely impacted by the global financial crisis in late 2000s, and despite bailouts by the international community in 2010, the domestic economy has struggled to find its footing in the years since. With rigid austerity measures introduced, national spending diminished, leaving millions without access to healthcare. Compounded by unemployment rates increasing trifold (from 7·7% in 2008 to 24·3% in 2012) and the state-run clinic service's budget being slashed by 25% from 2009 and 2011, the latest closure - ostensibly to restructure the network in response to the bailouts - is yet another blow to Greece's crumbling healthcare framework. As a result, the Greek populace is experiencing a spike in HIV rates, tuberculosis, depression, and infant deaths.
Published in The Lancet, the report entitled Greece's health crisis: from austerity to denialism is a blistering indictment of both the austerity measures and the national and international responses to the crisis. "The cost of austerity is being borne mainly by ordinary Greek citizens, who have been affected by the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe in modern times," said Oxford University's Dr. David Stuckler, a senior author of the study. "We hope this research will help the Greek government mount an urgently needed response to these escalating human crises."
The findings include confronting numbers around the increase in HIV rates following budget cuts to the country's needle exchange programs - rising from 15 cases in intravenous drug users to 484 cases in the space of three years. Similarly, heroin use has seen a swift upturn, though funding for social workers has been sliced by a third. Heroin users are also falling victim to tuberculosis, with the number of cases doubling in the past year.
Mental illness rates have experienced a similarly harrowing increase. From 2008 to 2011, depression rates jumped by 250 percent, while suicides increased by 45 percent. As with social workers, funding for mental health care was diminished by 55 percent from 2011 to 2012. More worrying still is the sharp increase in infant deaths, demonstrating a 43 percent increase between 2008 and 2010.
Indirect spending cuts have also affected Greece's health landscape. The mosquito-spraying schedule has been lightened, leading to the first cases of malaria in the area in some forty years.
Speaking to The Independent, Christos Sideris, co-founder of the Metropolitan Community Clinic in Hellniko, Athens, illustrated the dire situation in Greece. "The healthcare situation in Greece is, unfortunately, dramatic. We have helped more than 4,400 patients, with more than 20,300 appointments in 26 months of operation," he said of the clinic's free medical services to patients without health insurance. "We look after more than 300 children below the age of three, and have helped 126 cancer patients to receive chemotherapy, in collaboration with a public hospital. This is not done in an official capacity, but by the people working there, every Wednesday after working hours, with donated medicines."
The University of Cambridge's Alexander Kentikelenis, the leader author of the study, hastened to point out that the data collated and measured just scratched the surface of the what could be measured in the future. "This is what we can measure in the short run. Health data is usually around two to three years behind, so 2012 is the only second full year of austerity," he said. "It's been two years since then. What is most alarming is the rapidly increasing number of Greeks no longer accessing the health system. Unemployment in Greece is now about 28% and they are uninsured, which should generate a legitimate debate about what happens to these people in the long term. The leadership aren't really discussing this."
