From United Press International……

An alarming new word has been born. It is “hypermortality,” which might be defined as an extraordinary tendency toward death. It jumps from the first page of the U.N. Development Program report entitled “Demographic Policy in Russia.”

“The Russian phenomenon of hypermortality comes to be observed primarily in working-age populations,” it says.

“Compared to the majority of countries that have similar levels of economic development, mortality in Russia is 3-5 times higher for men and twice as high for women.”

What this means, the report says, is that the size of the working-age population “will fall by up to 1 million people annually already by 2020-25.”

The effect of this will be to raise the dependency load (the number of young and old people dependent on those of working age) to 670 to 750 per thousand by 2020 and to 900 to 1,000 per thousand by 2025.

Read the whole thing.