According to Dnipropetrovsk Census Results, the Environment Does Not Affect Duration of Life
Dnipropetrovsk oblast’s oldest resident, a woman aged 112, lives in Pyatykhatky district, just next to Zhovti Vody notorious for its uranium mines. This was announced by the oblast’s statistics authority at a press conference which made public the results of the first all-Ukrainian census. Yet, the all-time longevity record belongs to a woman who recently died aged 116 in Dniprodzerzhynsk, where the environmental condition is in no way better than in Zhovti Vody, an “ecological disaster area,” on account of chemical and steel mills and millions of tons of radioactive wastes from the Prydniprovsky Chemical Works. What is more, statisticians found that, oddly enough, there is practically no relationship between longevity and the environment. The heavily-polluted industrial Dnipropetrovsk oblast hosts today 93 residents who have turned one hundred and more, with their number remaining essentially unchanged since the last Soviet-time census.
Yet, this can be partly put down to the progressive aging of the population, for the share of old-age pensioners among the Dnipropetrovsk residents has gone up from 20% to 24.3% since 1989. Concurrently, the percentage of children has dropped from 22.6% to 17.2%, although the negative tendency, when death rate was twice the birth rate, has been on the wane since 2001. In 2002 alone, the oblast had the number of newborns 2,000 as high as in the previous year.
Nevertheless, statistics says that the population of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, still second largest after that of Donetsk, has dwindled by 8% to 3.6 million since 1989. The population of the oblast center has also registered a considerable drop from 1.192 to 1.087 million. However, Dnipropetrovsk still ranks third in this respect after Kyiv and Kharkiv.
On the other hand, the above-mentioned press conference also announced the encouraging information that the current migration of people from urban to rural areas has unexpectedly breathed a new life into some deserted villages. For example, census officers who visited two villages already listed as “dead” found there some safe and sound newly-arrived inhabitants.
Another thing that astonished the statisticians was that it was easiest of all to enumerate... hobos. They were readily available for contact and told all kinds of details about themselves. But, to tell the truth, census officers were helped by police and neighborhood watch and even — in Kryvy Rih — by military patrols. Five census officers were bitten by dogs, when they visited private houses. As experts say, this is also a piece of genuine, albeit grim, statistics.
