One out of every six people in the world is an adolescent. Put another way, there are more than one billion teenagers on Earth. Yet we pay very little attention to the health of 10- to 19-year-olds, individually and collectively.
A new report from the World Health Organization, entitled Health of the World’s Adolescents: A Second Chance in the Second Decade, hopes to change that situation.
As the report notes, we tend to assume – and not entirely without reason – that youth is the healthiest time of life.
But the teen years are not all about hormones, acne and heartbreak. Teenagers face a host of health challenges, and these issues will affect them for the rest of their lives.
About 1.3 million adolescents die annually and what’s truly tragic is almost every one of those deaths is preventable.
The WHO report includes a list of the top-10 causes of death in adolescence.
It reads like an action plan for where the world should be investing its public-health and health-promotion dollars: road-traffic injuries, HIV/AIDS, suicide, respiratory infections, violence, diarrhea, drowning, meningitis, epilepsy and, finally, endocrine, blood and immune disorders.
In developed countries such as Canada, adolescent deaths are uncommon – even more rare than childhood mortality. In 2011, only 1,022 of 242,074 deaths in this country were in the 10 to 19 age group; motor-vehicle crashes and suicide account for the vast majority.
Of course, mortality is not the only way of measuring the health of a population, particularly a typically healthy demographic such as teenagers.
Teens are risk-takers – thanks to their developing brains – and the decisions they make about smoking, drinking, driving and sex (among others) will have a profound, life-long impact on their physical, mental and economic health. So too will the conditions they may develop in adolescence, such as obesity or depression.
In fact, the report makes the point well that mental-health issues are the overwhelming health challenge for young people, regardless of where they live in the world.
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