One in four Irish men die in their prime, says expert

ONE IN four Irish men die at a time when they should be “at their most productive”, a leading British expert in men’s health …

ONE IN four Irish men die at a time when they should be “at their most productive”, a leading British expert in men’s health has told a conference at NUI Galway (NUIG).

Some 26.6 per cent of all Irish male deaths occur between the ages of 15 and 64 years, compared to 16.5 per cent for females in this age category, Prof Alan White of Leeds Metropolitan University Centre for Men’s Health has said.

However, Ireland made a significant start in tackling the issue with last year’s publication of a national men’s health policy, Prof White said.

He was speaking yesterday at the 14th annual health promotion conference hosted by NUIG’s Health Promotion Research Centre. Minister for Health Mary Harney is due to close the conference today.

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Prof White said that when he began looking at the issue of men’s health in Britain in the mid 1990s, very little priority was attached to the subject.

One of the main challenges was the apathy displayed by the majority of men towards their own health and wellbeing.

Not only was there a need for more research in this area, but there was a need for more engagement to raise awareness among men from an early age, he said.

Prof White noted that Australia has also developed a men’s health policy, and the old working men’s club model had been adapted to “men’s sheds”, where older men could discuss such issues with the younger generation, he noted.

In Leeds, rugby clubs and pubs had been targeted for awareness raising, and humour was deployed in poster advertising in men’s urinals, he said. The posters that worked were “the ones that weren’t defaced”.

Prof White said he believed men’s health should be developed as a distinct discipline or field of practice, given that there were “remarkably few” dedicated research centres around the world.

“We’ve had women’s health for years and no one has baulked at that,” he said.

There was a need to ensure men’s survival rates during their working years were better, given the impact of the loss of a father, partner or employee on society as a whole, he said.

Dr Noel Richardson of the Institute of Technology, Carlow, who is principal author of the State’s first national policy on men’s health and chairman of the Men’s Health Forum, said he did not believe there was a crisis in men’s health in Ireland – but there was a type of crisis in “certain sub-groups”.

Enormous advances had been made in the area here in the past decade, he said, and the Men’s Health Forum had been critically important in connecting research to practitioners on the ground.

Dr Richardson said he believed it was an enormous oversight to view gender as applicable to women only.

He said that poorer men tended to suffer from poor health, but it was difficult to determine the “causal pathways”.

There was also a cluster effect, he said, in that material factors influenced cultural/psychosocial factors in terms of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.