the north-south health divide

The health divide between the North and South of the country is at its widest for 40 years and is claiming the lives of tens of thousands of people before their time, a study has found.

Iain Buchan, professor of public health informatics at the University of Manchester, who led the study, said that genetic, climatic and environmental differences could "in no way" account for the gap. Rather than pinning the blame on differences in lifestyle such as smoking and drinking, the key factor behind the gap was money, he said.

Every year 37,000 people – enough to fill a football stadium – die in the North earlier than their counterparts in the South. But all efforts to narrow the gap have failed. Premature deaths before the age of 75 are a fifth higher in the North, and the gap has changed little since the 1960s. It even widened between 2000 and 2008.

Researchers warned yesterday that the excess toll of ill health and disability in the North was "decimating the region at the rate of one major city every decade". It is certain to get worse as the effects of the recession are felt disproportionately in the North.