Overwhelming Russian Death Increase

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin signed a decree demanding that the countries life expectancy increase to 74 by 2018. It seems that the Russian population is starting to make a decrease. More people are dying than being born which is due to a number to risk factors. According to this article, half of the population is overweight,  more than half of the men smoke, and citizens drink up to four gallons of alcohol a year! Putin is afraid that the population will decline down to 107 million by 2050, when just twenty years ago the country was at a population of 148 million. 

Russian is taking as many steps possible aid in stopping this population dilemma.  A law just passed in January that no longer labeled beer as a food, but an alcoholic beverage and can no longer be sold on the street. The house of parliament is trying to pass a law that would ban smoking in public. The chairmen of congress wants to raise the price of cigarettes because 20 million packs of cigarettes are bought each year in Russia, which has lead to 400 thousand tobacco related deaths! The country also trying to enforce the use of seat belts because alcohol contributes to a huge number of car accidents. Some people are protesting these healthy changes that Russia is trying to make. Their argument is that people will have health problems regardless of weather or not they smoke or drink.

This article makes it seem like the Russians are sloppy people who care more about the comforts of smoking and drinking than their own lives. In the beginning of the article, the writer states that obesity is also a big threat to Russian health, but it is not mentioned again in the article. This could bring the readers to question if the decrease in Russian population could possibly be causes by other factors not mentioned in the article as well. 

It seems that Russia could actually benefit from globalization in public health. If countries with better health habits aided in the countries quest to stop this epidemic, the country could grow in population and in knowledge.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-tries-to-improve-life-expectancy-with-laws-curbing-drinking-smoking/2013/02/20/7ad5c290-77ab-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html

Emma Starnes, 8:44 am, 2/22/2013