IT'S OFFICIAL. The free market system is bad for your health. And a growing tide of premature deaths, chronic sickness and plunging birthrates across eastern Europe bear witness to the problem.
In Russia, Bulgaria and eastern Germany, deaths now outnumber births, often by two to A massive backlog of health problems generated under stalinist rule by industrial pollution, smoking, excessive alcohol and poverty has now combined with a crisis situation in cash-strapped health services to wipe out large numbers of men and women in the prime of life.
Death rates in Russia have rocketed by 30 percent since 1989, while birth rates have plunged by 46 percent. Life expectancy for Russian men has fallen to 59, the same as in Pakistan.
Poland
In Poland, birth rates have fallen 20 percent, in Bulgaria 30 percent.
The biggest fall is in eastern Germany, where birth rates have dropped from a low 12 per 1,000 in 1989 to just 6.5, with the biggest fall coinciding with the resion and fun. moval of the Berlin Wall.
Unemployment levels, reaching 40 percent in some areas of eastern Europe, are helping to trigger an increase in depression and suicides as well as povertyrelated diseases. In Russia 1992 alone saw a 20 percent increase in deaths from unnatural causes, making this the main cause of death for people of working age.
Nearly 60 percent of children born in Russia today show symptoms of rickets or suffer from diabetes.
Unhealthy kids
Russian medical experts warn that only one school-kid in five can be considered 'healthy' when they leave school, and only 13 percent of technical college students.
While the economic collapse has slashed the value of pay packets and plunged working class families into poverty, the inroads of capitalism have compounded historic problems of heavy smoking and high-fat diets.
Sixty percent of adult males smoke in Hungary, and 15 percent suffer from alcohol-related illness. An increase in the fat level of the Hungarian diet from 30 to 38 percent since 1970 has encouraged a 50 percent increase in heart disease. Hungarian life expectancy is falling faster than in any industrialised country but Russia.
But in the wreckage of stalinist rule, capitalist multinationals are moving in eager to make a fast buck out of the unhealthy habits of eastern Europe.
PepsiCo is investing $500 million in setting up new branches of Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell, serving extra fat to Poland.
The giant Philip Morris tobacco corporation is investing nearly $1 billion to increase sales in eastern Europe.
Ironically, the safest place to grow up or live through middle age is the stalinist state least touched by the market changes: Albania.
Unable to afford much meat, and with a backward economy little changed by the upheavals elsewhere, Albania boasts East Europe's highest life expectancy, and low incidence of heart disease, cancer and suicide. • CUBA's showpiece health services are creaking under the strain of the USA's 32-year trade embargo, and the economic pressures after the collapse of Cuba's sponsors in the Soviet Union.
Cuba still has three times as many doctors per head as Britain and nearly twice as many as the USA. But with US influence exerted to block imports of vitally-needed drugs and medical equipment, they are forced to struggle against the odds.
Antibiotics and more sophisticated heart and cancer drugs are among a list of 200 medicines which Bill Clinton's US administration is preventing being sold openly to Cuba.
While almost ten percent of Cubans suffer from asthma, inhalers are almost impossible to obtain.
Money for health care is also under pressure, with steadily reducing budgets since 1989.
There are fears that many of the Impressive gains in public health and life expectancy made since the 1959 Revolution could be rolled back for lack of water treatment chemicals, soaps and detergents.