Disabled account for 25% of Japan's 2011 quake-linked deaths: survey

Nearly a quarter of those who died of illness or stress linked to the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan's hardest-hit prefectures were disabled, a Kyodo News survey released Sunday showed.Disabled people accounted for 24.6 percent of total "disaster-related deaths" in the northeastern prefectures of Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi, far above their 7 percent representation among the population as a whole estimated by the health ministry.It is also much higher than the around 14 percent representation of people aged over 65, many of whom died after the disaster on March 11, 2011, because…READ FULL ARTICLE