"President Elect of The World Medical Association Slams Britain's "Social Injustice""

Quote: "“Social injustice” is killing 200,000 people in the UK every year, the president-elect of the World Medical Association has said. Professor Sir Michael Marmot, whose has spearheaded influential research on how income, education, working conditions and other social factors impact our health, said that if all people had the same good health as the top 10 per cent, nearly half of all premature deaths – those before the age of 75 – could be prevented. The figure is calculated by applying the mortality rates among people with a university education to the entire population. Health inequalities affect all countries, but the UK is known to perform worse than many of its European neighbours.“This is not just about the poor,” said Professor Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London. “It’s about all of us below the top. Health inequality is something that affects all of society. Professor Marmot, who will assume presidency of the WMA later this year, and who is publishing a new book on health inequalities, The Health Gap: the challenge of an Unequal World added: “If these 200,000 deaths were caused by a pollutant people would be on the streets marching to have it banned. The irony is, the actual cause is just as pin-pointable as a toxin. The cause is inequalities in the conditions in which we are born, grow, live, work and age, and it’s damaging the health of us all.”" Go to: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/social-injustice-is-killing-200000-people-in-the-uk-every-year-says-future-wma-chief-10493636.html