The grand duchy was placed ahead of France (14), Germany (16) and Belgium (26) in the 2017 index, the top scorer of which was Italy, followed by Iceland and Switzerland.

The index looked at a host of health factors, including life expectancy, cause of death, health risks from high blood pressure and tobacco use, malnutrition and availability of clean water.

Luxembourg is a leader in terms of life expectancy, according to government figures for 2013, with women living to on average 84.8 and men to 80.2, meanwhile the gap between men and women’s life expectancy has been steadily closing.

According to Unicef, mortality rates of under fives are 2 to every 1,000. It should be noted that Luxembourg’s nomadic population may skew the figures.

Table: Bloomberg

Each year around 10,000 new people move to Luxembourg while around 163,000 people who live over the border come to Luxembourg to work and therefore use local health services. Vice versa, it is fairly common for Luxembourg residents to go over the border to seek health services, particularly for patients seeking specialists.

In the past it has traditionally been Luxembourg’s low taxes on fuel and tobacco and the tourism this creates which misleadingly inflates per capita consumption to the country's detriment.

This, however, did not seem to go against Luxembourg in the Bloomberg index and nor did Luxembourg’s high rate of premature deaths linked to air pollution, currently at 300. In a recent speech Luxembourg environment minister Carole Dieschbourg outlined the figure, putting it in perspective by comparing it to the 37 deaths caused by road traffic accidents.

It is not the first time that Luxembourg has ranked well in a health index. In the 2016 Euro Health Consumer Index, published in February, Luxembourg was ranked sixth.