More Demographic Fallout From the Libyan Revolt

Amid the violence in Libya, guest workers from African and Asian nations are leaving in droves--or at least they are trying to leave. The New York Times reports that 180,000 people are piled up at the Libyan borders with Tunisia to the northwest and Egypt to the east. 

Appealing for international help on Wednesday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “We need concrete action on the ground to provide humanitarian and medical assistance. Time is of the essence. Thousands of lives are at risk.”

Several aid groups were operating on the Tunisian and Egyptian borders, handing out food and supplies to the refugees and assessing the situation for providing more help.

But it was the Tunisian border that worried aid groups the most.

“There is an absolutely mammoth task that is absolutely imperative” to ease pressure on the border area, Sybella Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva, said Wednesday. “The capacity of the border area is bursting.”

At the same time, the disruption of the oil supply from Libya has caused a sharp increase in gas prices, as anyone who drives already knows, and this is cascading into higher food prices because so many of the inputs to agriculture depend upon petroleum.

The Food Price Index, which monitors average monthly price changes for a variety of key staples, rose to 236 points in February from 231 points in January, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.

It was the highest level since FAO began monitoring prices in 1990.

"Unexpected oil price spikes could further exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets," David Hallam, director of the Rome-based FAO's trade and market division, was quoted as saying in a statement.

The Food Balancing Act

Philosophers through the ages, including Aristotle, Confucius, and Buddha, have extolled the virtue of the golden man, of balance, of the middle way. When it comes to world food security issues, we seem to have lost that way. There are literally billions of people in the world who have too little to eat, while another billion or two have dramatically more than they need to eat. The danger of eating too much, especially when it is not very nutritious, is illustrated by the global trend in obesity. Obesity is closely related to type 2 diabetes, which has been implicated in a shortening of life expectancy in Europe and North America, and almost certainly elsewhere.

The analysis used pooled medical information for 820,900 people from nearly 100 studies done mostly in Europe and North America. The results are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

A 50-year-old with diabetes dies six years sooner than someone without the disease, and not just from a heart attack or a stroke, new research suggests.

The large international effort to measure diabetes' toll found the disease also raises the risk of dying prematurely from a host of other ailments, even breast cancer and pneumonia.

 "It's quite a wide sweep of conditions," said Dr. John Danesh of Cambridge University in Britain, who led the team of researchers. While most people think of heart problems, diabetes surprisingly "appears to be associated with a much broader range of health implications than previously suspected."Putting the six years lost in context, he said, long-term smoking shortens life by 10 years.

Smoking Still a Health Risk in the United States

Americans are smoking a lot less than they used to, and that's a good thing. But heavy smoking in the past is still killing people at the older ages in the US and that is an important reason why life expectancy lags behind other rich nations. This is one of the conclusions of a new report from the National Research Council titled “Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries, edited by Eileen M. Crimmins, Samuel H. Preston, and Barney Cohen. Professor Preston, from the University of Pennsylvania, and literally the world's foremost authority on this topic, was interviewed by The Nation's Health, a publication of the American Public Health Association, which summarized the findings:

Over the past 25 years, life expectancy at age 50 in the United States has been increasing, but at a much slower rate than in some other high-income countries. Researchers attribute the slower rate of increase — for women in the United States the increase was about 40 percent smaller than in other countries — to widespread smoking 30 to 50 years ago.