Austerity measures imposed by the Greek government since the economic crisis have inflicted “shocking” harm on the health of the population, leaving nearly a million people without access to healthcare, experts have said.

In a damning report on the impact of spending cuts on the Greek health system, academics found evidence of rising infant mortality rates, soaring levels of HIV infection among drug users, the return of malaria, and a spike in the suicide count.

Greece’s public hospital budget was cut by 25 per cent between 2009 and 2011 and public spending on pharmaceuticals has more than halved, leading to some medicine becoming unobtainable, experts from Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) said.

Rising unemployment in a country where health insurance is linked to work status has led to an estimated 800,000 people lacking either state welfare or access to health services and in some areas international humanitarian organisations such as Médecins du Monde have stepped in to provide healthcare and medicines to vulnerable people.

The report, which is published today in the medical journal The Lancet, accuses the Greek government and the international community – which demanded swingeing cuts as a condition of bailing out the Greek economy during the debt crisis between 2010 and 2012 – of being “in denial” about the scale of hardship inflicted on the Greek people.

Health employees demonstrate outside the Health Ministry in Athens Health employees demonstrate outside the Health Ministry in Athens (Getty Images) “The cost of austerity is being borne mainly by ordinary Greek citizens, who have been affected by the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe in modern times,” said senior author Dr David Stuckler, of Oxford University. “We hope this research will help the Greek government mount an urgently needed response to these escalating human crises.”

Greece was forced to make massive cutbacks to meet the terms of twin bailout packages, totalling €240 billion, offered by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known as the Troika. Health spending was capped at six per cent of GDP.

Analysis of figures from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey revealed a leap in the number of people with unmet health needs, the authors said. The cost of healthcare has been significantly shifted away from the state and towards patients, with new fees for prescriptions introduced and charges for out-patient visits to hospital raised from €3 to €5 .

Government disease prevention schemes have also been rolled back leading to the resurgence and revival of once rare infectious diseases – including malaria, which has returned to Greece for the first time in 40 years.

“There are a whole series of infectious diseases which have been kept at bay over the past 50 or 60 years by strengthened public health efforts,” Martin McKee, professor of European public health at LSHTM and one of the report’s co-authors, told The Independent. “If you lift up your guard, as the Greek example shows, they can very easily exploit those changes.

“The experience of Greece demonstrates the necessity of assessing the health impact of all policies carried out by national governments and by the European Union.”

People stand outside the People stand outside the "Polyklikini", one of the hospitals affected by overhaul of the health sector (Getty Images) Prevention and treatment programmes for illicit drug users faced major cuts, with a third of street work programmes halted in 2009-10, the first year of austerity. Reductions in the numbers of syringes and condoms distributed to known drug users has led directly to a spike in the rate of HIV infections in this community, the report said – from just 15 in 2009 to 484 in 2012.

Although reliable data on the health impact on the wider population will take several years to emerge, the Greek National School of Public Health reported a 21 per cent rise in stillbirths between 2008 and 2011, which was attributed to reduced access to prenatal services, and infant mortality also rose by 43 per cent between 2008 and 2010.

The suicide rate has gone up from around 400 in 2008 to nearly 500 in 2011.

Alexander Kentikelenis, researcher in sociology at the University of Cambridge and the report’s lead author, said that the Greek welfare state had “failed to protect people at the time they needed support the most.”

“What’s happening to vulnerable groups in Greece is quite shocking,” he told The Independent. “It’s quite straightforward to measure what has happened, it’s much harder to quantify the long-term health implications for the long-term unemployed and uninsured…Leaving health problems to get out of hand ends up costing a state much more in the long run.”

The Greek Ministry of Health and Social Solidarity did not respond to a request for comment.

Case study

The Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko in Athens was founded in December 2011. It is run by volunteer doctors and provides free healthcare to people without medical insurance

Co-founder Christos Sideris told The Independent: “The healthcare situation in Greece is, unfortunately, dramatic. We have helped more than 4,400 patients, with more than 20,300 appointments in 26 months of operation. We look after more than 300 children below the age of three, and have helped 126 cancer patients to receive chemotherapy, in collaboration with a public hospital. This is not done in an official capacity, but by the people working there, every Wednesday after working hours, with donated medicines.

We have three basic rules: we accept no money from anyone, we have no party politics, and we do not advertise anyone for the help they are offering us. We only accept money from our own volunteers – there are 250 of them at the moment. These volunteers do fundraisers and give money to the clinic. The local municipality also helps us. Our medicines are all donated. There are more than 40 community clinics and pharmacies like us across Greece. They cannot solve the problem – we’re only here because there is a need for us to exist. We cannot substitute a public health system and we do not want to.”

Greek police enter schools, quiz children on political activities

Greek police, under the orders of the Ministry of Public Order & Citizen Protection, have begun to enter schools in order to establish the political views and activities of schoolchildren and their families. Efimerida Ton Syntakton has revealed that in recent weeks, police have entered many schools in and around Athens on this basis, including at Agia Paraskevi, Psychico and Kallithea and Keratsini. Efimerida Ton Syntakton reported, “A new era of law, order and intimidation begins in schools, which it seems will fall under the remit of the Ministry for Citizens’ Protection as well as the Ministry of Education. How else can one explain how within one week at least five high school students were taken in for questioning by the police and were asked about their families’ political leanings because they took part in a school occupation? There have been dozens of instances of police conducting ‘visits’ at primary and nursery schools in the Attica region.”
The newspaper noted that school headmasters were not informed as to the reason why police asked to meet with them. According to reports, police officers requested the personal contact details of headmasters and elementary and nursery school teachers and harassed them over the phone.
One of the police raids took place at the Keratsini High School on February 8, where students questioned by police were singled out because they had participated in a protest occupation of the school in October. Last autumn, teachers’ strikes won mass support from students, who feared the impact of the cuts being imposed, as well as the government’s overall assault on education. By late September, more than 100 schools nationally, including Keratsini High School, were under occupation by their students.
The school is in the same suburb where anti-fascist hip-hop musician Pavlos Fyssas was stabbed to death by a member of the fascist Golden Dawn group in September 2013. During his funeral, students interrupted their lessons nationwide to commemorate Fyssas.
More recently, on January 31, around 4,000 participated in an anti-fascist protest of mainly young people in Keratsini, at the scene where Fyssas was killed.
This is the context of growing social unrest and radicalisation of young people in which the police arrived at Keratsini High School, where they took five children, out of seven children on a list that had been provided to them, to a local police station.
Among the questions the children were asked at the station were, “What do your mother and father vote? What jobs do your parents do? How is your family’s financial situation? Which of your teachers were in favour of your strike action [school occupation]? Why did you go on strike? Were you abetted by teachers or a political party?”
The newspaper reported, “It is noteworthy that one of the students made a statement without his parents being present.”
The interrogation of the schoolchildren at Keratsini also revealed that the Ministry of Public Order & Citizen Protection is attempting to enlist the assistance of the education authorities in their surveillance operations. Efimerida Ton Syntakton added , “While the children were horrified by the interrogation they were subjected to at the police station, parents and teachers were overtly annoyed with the lyceum headmistress who gave a total of seven names to the police. Prior to this, she had telephoned the station the previous week to give names of students that had taken part in the student occupations last October. In contrast, the headmaster of the Gymnasium that shares the same grounds refused to notify the police authority in a similar fashion.”
SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, stated that the Keratsini incident was sanctioned at the highest level. It reported, “The preliminary investigation that saw underage students taken into the Keratsini police station…was ordered by a written request by the Supreme Court’s prosecutor’s office to the Piraeus Appeal Prosecutors and subsequently to the Head of the Piraeus prosecutor’s office.” Efimerida Ton Syntakton ’s investigative report uncovered a circular from the General Attica Police Authority (GADA), revealing that the operation was part of a coordinated effort. The document contained the following instructions:
“Full documentation of all school units within GADA’s jurisdiction and submit these to the relevant subdivisions in excel format.
“Arrange personal contacts and meetings with the principals of the above schools in order to record existing problems and needs during school operations as well as the collection of any requests that will be submitted by them and are within the remit of the Ministry of Public Order and Protection of Citizens in general and of the Police specifically.
“Drawing up of in-depth reports for the above and the submissions of their views of these to the relevant police subdivisions.”
The police response to the leak was an attempt to justify it by claiming the operation was about “the protection of young people from various dangers such as drugs, criminality (i.e., attacks against pupils to violently extract mobile phones and money), pupil victims of traffic accidents, all of which constitute a duty of care for the police.”
Such lies are contradicted by the overt political nature of the operation in which schoolchildren were asked a number of questions, of a very specific character, relating to their political views, activities and affiliations, as well as those of their teachers and families. A SYRIZA parliamentarian revealed that the pupils were pressured by police officers to give the names of their peers who took part in the school occupation.
On February 17, a protest against the police operation was held outside the offices of Piraeus’s public prosecutor. Among those participating were schoolchildren, students and youth, as well as the Keratsini-Drapetsona Parents’ Association and other parents’ associations from Piraeus. The local teachers’ union held a two-hour walkout, allowing teachers to attend the demonstration. Those in attendance carried placards with slogans including “The struggle continues” and “Terror will not pass”. Many of the youth chanted slogans in opposition to the government’s moves to criminalise their right to protest.
Following the outcry against the police operation, the prosecutor’s office announced, without explanation or apology, that it had “archived” the case and no further action would follow. Prior to that, at least one media outlet had reported that children might face charges and possibly a court case.
Repression and outright criminalisation of the right to protest is being stepped up, in order to impose mass poverty against millions of people. The full force of the state has been used to crush strikes, and laws that were last used during the 1967-1974 rule of the military junta have been resurrected to enable this. Subway staff, refuse workers, truckers, workers at state broadcaster ERT and university staff have been forced to end strikes and protests due to brutal repression.
Such draconian measures, sanctioned at the highest levels by the government at the behest of the troika, must of necessity target young people who are systematically denied any future and access to decent education, health care and a job and have joined the numerous protests over the last years.
Students have conducted protests at universities around the country, both in defence of their right to an education and in solidarity with university staff who are being sacked as part of thousands of job losses throughout the public sector. In November 2011, Greek police made their first raid on a university since the fall of the military junta.