For the first time in more than 50 years, an infectious disease was in the top five leading causes of death in Australia in 2022, according to a new report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
This flies in the face of the trend over the past 100 years of deaths from infectious diseases declining.
The Australia’s Health 2024 report found that even though life expectancy in Australia has increased substantially since the start of the 20th century, chronic conditions such as cancers and dementia have increased. Swings and roundabouts.
More than 450 new cases of cancer were diagnosed every day in 2023 and the impact of dementia on the lives of Australians is increasing, despite there still being major data gaps on dementia in Australia.
Incredibly, the biggest data gaps are not knowing the overall number of people who currently have dementia or the number being newly diagnosed each year.
The report also found that extreme heat caused the most injury hospitalisations related to extreme weather over the past 10 years (78% or 7,104 hospitalisations). The highest number of recorded injury hospitalisations related to extreme weather occurred during Australia’s last El Niño year of “unprecedented temperatures” in 2019–20.
There was an average of 912 injury hospitalisations related to extreme weather per year between 2012 and 2022. Counts exceeded 1,000 cases in 2013–14, 2016–17 and 2019–20.
On average, the rate of injury hospitalisation from bushfires is 1.6 times as high in El Niño years (0.44 per 100,000 people) as in La Niña years (0.27 per 100,000).
On the topic of concussions, falls were the leading cause of concussion hospitalisations (50%) and sport was involved in just over 1 in 5 concussion hospitalisations.
In 2021-22 there were 17,700 Emergency department presentations and 10,800 hospitalisations for concussions. They have been increasing by on average 5 per cent per year over the past eight years.
The health report for young people is mixed. Even though Australians are living longer than ever before (children born in 2023 expected to live into their 80s), just over one-tenth of their lives will be spent with ill health.
And the burden of chronic conditions remains high. Around 6 in 10 Australians are estimated to live with a long-term health condition. Chronic conditions continue to have a considerable impact – 91% of the non-fatal burden of disease is related to them.
Vaping continues to trend upwards – especially for young people – despite tobacco smoking rates continuing to decline. Mental health is also a major issue, with 43 per cent of Australian aged 16-85 have experienced a mental disorder in their life, in 2020-2022.
The cost of all these health burdens combined is high, with $241.3 billion spent on health in 2021-22, about $9,365 per person. Stay well.
