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Health Check: 09/11/2009

09/11/2009

BBC World Service - Health Check, 09/11/2009

How the reunification of Germany has affected the health of two nations in various ways.

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down – and in east Germany asthma and allergies went up. How the reunification of Germany has affected the health of two nations in some rather surprising ways.

When the Berlin Wall fell on this day twenty years ago, its effect on health probably wasn’t the on the minds of the inhabitants anywhere in  Germany. But for epidemiologists the joining of these two countries provided a natural experiment of how fundamental political change can affect health. And within just a couple of years reunification was already affecting the levels of disease in both the former East Germany (the GDR) and West Germany - and it wasn’t all good news.  

Claudia Hammond talks to Ellen Nolte, a public health specialist from the Cambridge think-tank the Rand Group, who since 1990 has tracked patterns of disease and life expectancy in the former east and west Germany.

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