IJE Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2006
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(6):1400-1405; doi:10.1093/ije/dyl235
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2006; all rights reserved.
Commentary |
Commentary: The Health Crisis in the USSR: reflections on the Nicholas Eberstadt 1981 review of Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s
University of Oxford, Wolfson College, UK. E-mail: christopher.davis@economics.ox.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Nicholas Eberstadt's 1981 article, The Health Crisis in the USSR, in the New York Review of Books1 played an important role in publicizing the growing health problems in the USSR and provided an insightful preliminary analysis of their causes. His article started with a balanced review of the 1980 US Bureau of the Census technical report on Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s2 that I co-authored with Murray Feshbach, a distinguished demographer, but then widened its scope to evaluate the political, economic, social, and medical factors that could explain the growing difficulties in the Soviet health sector.
The article by Nicholas and our report challenged three prevailing conceptions. First, that the socialist countries were continuing to improve the health of their populations, measured by reductions in disease and mortality, and therefore provided models for other nations. Second, that age-specific mortality rates inevitably declined over time in all
| Historical context |
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| The genesis of the infant mortality report |
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| The Eberstadt article and its aftermath |
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