Russian Men's Health Crisis Finally Getting Attention from Russian Leaders

This article reports that Russian president Putin has finally decided to address the crisis in health/population implosion in Russia. Guaranteed if it were Russian women's health that was in such bad shape, it would have gotten a lot more attention a lot sooner. He also seems to be stressing the idea that Russian women should just have children -- and get paid for it, no less -- over Russian men getting better health care and education. Excerpt:

MOSCOW, May 10 — President Vladimir V. Putin today directed the Russian Parliament to adopt a 10-year program to stop Russia's sharply declining population, principally by offering financial incentives and subsidies to encourage Russian women to have more children.


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Mr. Putin then warned that Russia's population has been declining by almost 700,000 people a year, and that the state must stop the decline. In 2004, for every 16 Russians who died, only 10.4 Russian babies were born, according to the most recently available official data.

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And the average age of death for a Russian man was 58.9 years, far below that of other industrial nations, and roughly two decades behind the average age at death of an American male. Birth rates have also plummeted since Soviet times, falling from an average of 2.63 children per woman in 1958 and 1959 to 1.89 children per woman in 1990 and to 1.34 children per woman in 2004.

"The Russian crisis is not due to a single disease, or even a small set of microbial horrors," [Dr. Murray Feshbach, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars] wrote... it is the result of "a constellation of occurrences that include not only infectious disease, but alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, trauma injuries, astounding levels of cardiovascular disease, male/female estrangement and loss of family cohesion, declining physiological fertility, ugly environmental pollution and micronutrient starvation."

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http://news.mensactivism.org/articles/06/05/10/2214237.shtml