Health

Slow starts, supply shortages, disorganised and ad hoc management… Responses to COVID-19 across Europe have hardly been an occasion for pride. The OECD stresses the need to take into account the social inequalities in health, and consider health an investment rather than an expense.

Mental health resources in the European Union were scarce even before the pandemic. COVID-19 has caused a tsunami in mental health, and access to care is more difficult today. About 75 percent of psychiatry services in the EU have been taking place via telemedicine, but this is not a viable option for all patients.

Contrary to the trend across Europe, the Romanian capital has seen a drastic increase in AIDS cases in the last decade. The crisis is fueled by the use of synthetic drugs and lack of harm reduction services

A growing number of studies highlight the importance of clusters and superspreaders in the transmission of COVID-19. In order to fight the epidemic, we must have a better understanding of where outbreaks are happening and consider new ways of tracking cases.

Five years after the Dieselgate scandal, new research puts some figures on the social costs of vehicle emissions in over 400 European cities. It turns out that the annual damage to each city is worth €385 million on average.

According to the latest European Environment Agency report, a significant proportion of the burden of disease in Europe continues to be attributed to environmental pollution resulting from human activity.

As summer nears its end, it is becoming possible to evaluate the coronavirus pandemic’s toll on European regions over nearly six months. We have analysed data from 776 subnational regions to better understand where the virus is continuing to hit hard.

We have gathered data on excess deaths from 500 European regions to better understand the spread of the virus. Some regions report up to three times as many deaths as usual since March, but a large part of Europe has been able to live through the first wave of the pandemic without any significant excess death.

For weeks, Spain and Italy were epicentres of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their health defences had an important gap: large staffing shortages and low ratios of nurses to doctors. At the same time, nurses had higher infection rates than the general population, mainly because of the lack of personal protective equipment.

HIV has decreased more than any other cause of death in Europe, with deaths dropping by nearly a third between 2011 and 2016. However, parts of eastern Europe are in the grip of a new epidemic. In this report we look closer at HIV-related deaths across Europe region by region.