Health

Five years after the Dieselgate scandal, new research puts some figures on the social costs of vehicle emissions in over 400 European cities. It turns out that the annual damage to each city is worth €385 million on average.

According to the latest European Environment Agency report, a significant proportion of the burden of disease in Europe continues to be attributed to environmental pollution resulting from human activity.

As summer nears its end, it is becoming possible to evaluate the coronavirus pandemic’s toll on European regions over nearly six months. We have analysed data from 776 subnational regions to better understand where the virus is continuing to hit hard.

We have gathered data on excess deaths from 500 European regions to better understand the spread of the virus. Some regions report up to three times as many deaths as usual since March, but a large part of Europe has been able to live through the first wave of the pandemic without any significant excess death.

For weeks, Spain and Italy were epicentres of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their health defences had an important gap: large staffing shortages and low ratios of nurses to doctors. At the same time, nurses had higher infection rates than the general population, mainly because of the lack of personal protective equipment.

HIV has decreased more than any other cause of death in Europe, with deaths dropping by nearly a third between 2011 and 2016. However, parts of eastern Europe are in the grip of a new epidemic. In this report we look closer at HIV-related deaths across Europe region by region.

Not everyone is traveling to work these days, many are working from home. We have more time to watch things, to listen and read. Music services should be doing well out of this, but the data suggests just the opposite.      

The Coronavirus crisis is the first of its kind for the European Union. However, it is far from being the first existential crisis in the history of the Union. 

We inaugurate a new format for EDJNet's newsletter: once a month, we send out a special newsletter with a thematic focus, while the standard newsletter comes out every two weeks. Here's the March focus. 

Since the data available on the coronavirus pandemic is patchy and incomplete, it needs to be approached with caution and an awareness of what it can – and cannot – tell us about the deadly virus.