Antidepressant use in Europe continues to break records

• Since 2010, the growth in antidepressant use in Europe has been booming, while the number of people diagnosed with anxiety and depression has increased.
• In 2017, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the countries with the highest known use of antidepressants, the United Kingdom and Portugal, prescribed more than 100 daily doses per 1,000 inhabitants.
• Women over 65 are the most common consumers of benzodiazepines, even though the use of these addictive anti-anxiety medications in people over 65 years of age carries avoidable risks of cognitive deterioration and increased mortality from falls.

Mapping the migrant camps in Europe

Successful integration of refugees and migrants into their host society is at the core of the European migration strategy - at least, on paper. In reality their current living conditions show that they are far from meeting this objective. MIIR’s analysis on the refugee issue in Europe seeks to answer the question: "What are Europe’s plans for the refugees?”
 

How VAT hinders effective redistribution of wealth

VAT cancels out one-third of the effects of fiscal redistribution as it applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. The richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption.
 

What a year of pandemic tells us about European healthcare systems

The number of doctors and nurses and the population density are more important indicators than the number of ICUs in predicting Covid-19 deaths, there does not appear to be a causal association between per-capita numbers of ICUs and deaths, and excess mortality showed a correlation with the "pandemic waves".
 

The UK is feeling the consequences of Brexit

The impact of cross-Channel border closures concurrent with the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult to assess. A few clues make it possible to draw up an initial assessment, but long-term effects currently unknown will probably lead to underestimating its impact.
 

Rail accidents: Hungary leads the list in fatality figures

The trend of a steady decrease in the number of rail accidents continues, according to the annual assessment of the European Railway Agency. However, rail-related suicide rates remain roughly the same.
 

If Brussels wants to reduce fertilisers and pesticides

With its "farm to table" strategy, the European Commission aims to reduce the use of pesticides and fertilisers and at the same time increase organic production by 2030. But how?

EDJNet's podcast

We released the second episode of our four-episode podcast series to strike a balance of the first four years of operation of EDJNet. Lorenzo Ferrari (OBC Transeuropa), Clara Guibourg (J++), and Alexander Damiano Ricci (VoxEurop) discuss what makes transnational data journalism special.

Visualising risk: a modern implementation of the Risk Characterisation Theatre

OBC Transeuropa came up with a different visual approach to associate likelihood of occurrence of a given event to the lived experience of people viewing the graph.

The new interface has been developed by Giorgio Comai for EDJNet and you can read its outline in this post.

From the data journalism community

EU Open Data Days

The Publications Office of the European Union is organising the EU Open Data Days on 23-25 November, comprising the EU Data Viz Conference on open data and data visualisation for public administration as well as the EU Datathon, the EU's open data competition. If you'd like to be a speaker or a contestant, you can submit your proposal by 21 May.

Expert Group on AI & Data in Education and Training

The European Commission is setting up a group of experts that could assist it in the preparation of ethical guidelines in the field of AI and data in education and training; the activity should last until April 2022. Members of the group are selected via a call for applications, the deadline is 25 May.
👉 More info here

From SPHERA

SPHERA is a new consortium of independent European media delivering social media-first content. Its main channels are Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The SPHERA team is looking for young content makers who are eager to collaborate in a cross-border community. More specifically, they're looking for individuals aged 18-30 who can help the team produce scripts, photos as well as video- and audio-clips.
👉 All details here