Eurostat data reveals approximately 1.1 million annual deaths across the European Union are preventable through targeted public health interventions or enhanced medical care, according to Euractiv.
The agency’s 2022 figures, released this week, demonstrate chronic conditions, not infectious diseases, constitute Europe’s deadliest threat for citizens under 75. Specifically, 386,710 deaths stemmed from treatable conditions where quality healthcare could have altered outcomes, while 725,625 resulted from preventable chronic diseases including lung cancer, cardiovascular disorders, and alcohol-related poisoning.
Regional disparities remain stark: Latvia recorded the highest avoidable mortality rate, followed by Romania and Hungary. Conversely, Sweden, Italy, and Luxembourg reported the lowest figures. This East-West divide has widened since 2010 across key risk indicators – tobacco use, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes – according to recent World Health Organisation (WHO) analysis.
Trade unions and public health experts directly link these mortality patterns to systemic underinvestment. The OECD identifies an EU-wide shortage of 1.2 million healthcare workers, exacerbating treatment gaps. Esther Lynch, General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), condemned austerity’s human cost:
Despite the heroic daily efforts of healthcare workers regularly doing overtime to make up for huge shortages, these figures show again that austerity kills.
Alessandro Gallina of the European Public Health Alliance noted the persistent neglect of prevention in workforce planning:
[The Eurostat figures] underscore a painful truth: prevention remains key to reducing avoidable deaths, yet the EU’s health workforce planning still fails to fully embed it.
This critique emerges amid broader concerns about environmental health impacts, with pollution and climate change compounding chronic disease burdens through heightened respiratory and cardiovascular stress.
The data arrives as governments prepare for September’s UN General Assembly, where 2030 targets for non-communicable disease reduction will be negotiated. WHO European Regional Director Hans Kluge advocates “bold” prevention policies to reverse trends. However, health NGOs central to such prevention efforts face uncertainty under the EU’s forthcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2028-2034.
