Your postal code can determine your lifespan: report

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Your postal code can tell you a lot — not just about where you live, but also about your health.

A report in Maclean’s Magazine suggests that where you live and how much you earn can determine how soon you will die.

The magazine is spotlighting Code Red, an analysis by investigative reporter Steve Buist with the Hamilton Spectator, in collaboration with epidemiologist Neil Johnston, a faculty member in McMaster University’s department of medicine.

They looked at life and death in 135 Hamilton neighbourhoods and census tracts and, when they broke it down by income, found some shocking disparities.

If someone was born in the city’s poorest neighbourhood, they would die an average Third World death: at 65.5 years of age. If they lived five kilometres away in Hamilton’s leafy suburbs, they tended to live beyond 86 years.

Death comes years earlier with each step down the income ladder, despite having one of the world’s most advanced acute care health facilities located in the city.

Code Red finds among the most deprived neighbourhoods in Sudbury, Ontario, teenage pregnancy was 205 per cent higher; infant mortality, 139 per cent higher; and premature death, 86 per cent higher.

Maclean’s says the health region in Saskatoon also looked at health disparities in its city. In six low-income neighbourhoods, rates of infant mortality were 448 per cent higher; teen births, 1,549 per cent higher; and suicide attempts, 1,458 higher.

Ken MacQueen with Maclean’s is moderating a town hall discussion on the findings tonight in Hamilton, in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association.

“The results are quite shocking,” he tells News1130. “For every drop in income from the top level, people were losing about two to two and a half years of life. It’s not just something that affects the lower class. Death rates tend to be calculated by ‘the richer you are, the longer you live.'”

“What surprises me is the admission by doctors that really, they can only do so much for a person. Probably about 25 per cent of a person’s state of health and longevity is something you can attribute to doctors and hospitals and the health care system. Fully half of how long you live and how well you live is attributable to the education you have, the income you have, the type of housing you live in and whether you grew up in a single parent family or have a strong social net. These are the kinds of things that allow us to live longer or die sooner, depending on your life circumstances,” says MacQueen.

The Canadian Medical Association says we have a responsibility — a duty — to start advocating for policies that change people’s life circumstances.

“Governments have to start looking at the health implications of everything they do, whether it’s a change in unemployment insurance pay outs, whether it’s welfare — even things you wouldn’t even expect like changes in the education system. All these will have an impact that has to be looked at through a ‘health lens’,” adds MacQueen.

“Things are being done. A lot of the health units, Vancouver Coastal Health among them, are working much harder to correct some of these social determinants of health, or at least advocating. The problem is… a health unit can’t improve housing, policing, intervene with the federal government to give better funds for Aboriginal issues or intervene with the provincial government to increase welfare rates. All of these things have to be tied together.”

“Doctors are saying they aren’t experts on fixing housing or the education experts but they are experts on seeing what happens when they don’t work,” he says.

Tonight’s town hall meeting in Hamilton will be followed by Maclean’s-moderated discussions in Charlottetown and Calgary.