Average person now lives past 70
Global life expectancy has risen thanks to falling death rates from cancer and heart disease according to a new study
PUBLISHED : Friday, 19 December, 2014, 6:10am
UPDATED : Friday, 19 December, 2014, 6:10am
Bloomberg in New York
Average person now lives past 70
These are good times to be a baby. A child born last year will live six years longer on average than one born in 1990, the first time in history that life expectancy worldwide extends past age 70.
Much of the gain has come from poor countries, where better health infrastructure has helped people live dramatically longer lives, according to a paper published yesterday in the journal Lancet.
In rich countries, new drugs and other advances are stretching lifetimes, the study's authors said.
Worldwide, the expected length of life for an infant born last year grew 6.2 years, to 71.5 years old, according to the study, which was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Global life expectancy rose by 5.8 years in men and 6.6 years in women.
Eastern sub-Saharan Africans saw a 9.2-year gain in life expectancy between 1990 and 2013, the biggest increase of any region.
In some poor countries, such as Nepal, Rwanda, and East Timor, the outlook increased by more than 12 years.
"Outside of Southern Africa there's been quite substantial improvement in life expectancy everywhere," said Christopher Murray, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
"The progress we are seeing against a variety of illnesses and injuries is good - even remarkable - but we can and must do even better," he said,
Except for 1993, when the worldwide estimate was hurt by genocide in Rwanda, "you can see that global life expectancy, particularly since 2000, has been going up 0.3 of a year, every single year."
The report gives the most comprehensive and up-to-date estimates of the number of yearly deaths from 240 different causes in 188 countries over 23 years.
Murray's team's analysis found some poorer countries have made exceptional gains in life expectancy over that time period, with people in Nepal, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Niger, Maldives, East Timor and Iran now expected to live on average 12 years longer.
Researchers found especially large improvements among diseases susceptible to foreign aid and basic public health programmes.
Deaths caused by diarrhoea and common infectious diseases fell about 50 per cent, and the rate from tropical diseases such as malaria declined about 25 per cent.
The ramp up in international aid since 2000 has been particularly important, Murray said in a phone interview.
"It's very hard to not recognise the contribution of those health-development programmes for HIV and malaria. The causal connections there are irrefutable," Murray said.
Development assistance to poor countries from rich ones surged to more than US$120 billion in 2008 from less than US$80 billion in 2000, adjusting for inflation, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The study found, however, that death rates from some major chronic conditions were on the rise, including liver cancer caused by hepatitis C (up 125 per cent since 1990), drug use disorders (up 63 per cent), chronic kidney disease (up 37 per cent), diabetes (up nine per cent) and pancreatic cancer (up seven per cent).
The researchers also noted that suicide was a growing public health problem in India with half the world's suicide deaths alone occurring in India or China.
While death from violence has fallen - 69 per cent fewer people died from war and conflict as in 1990 - it is still a scourge in parts of the world.
In Syria, about 30,000 people were killed in war there last year, making it the primary cause of years of life lost, a measure of premature death.
Violence is the leading cause of years lost in Central Latin America, including in Colombia and Venezuela. Worldwide, suicide fell by 23 per cent.
Though the greatest advances were in developing countries, rich nations also saw gains, particularly by improving interventions for heart disease and cancer.
In the United States, life expectancy increased 3.5 years as smoking rates fell by almost half, according to the US Surgeon General. An area of concern are chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's and kidney disease, which both saw large increases.
To Murray, the study's lead author, there's no reason to think we're approaching a limit to the surge.
"You're not even seeing a tailing off in the best-off places," Murray said.
Australia, for example, has gained 4.8 years of life expectancy since 1990. "There's no sign of slowdown yet."
Additional reporting by Reuters
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Setback for efforts to cure HIV
Researchers reported another disappointment for efforts to cure Aids. Six patients given blood-cell transplants similar to one that cured a man known as "the Berlin patient" have failed, and all six patients died.
So far, Timothy Ray Brown, a US man treated in Germany, remains the only person thought to have been cured of infection with HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
Brown also had leukaemia, and had a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat the cancer from a donor with a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV.
A year later, Brown's leukaemia returned but his HIV did not. He had a second transplant in March 2008 from the same donor and appears to be free of both diseases since then, said the physician who treated him, Dr Gero Huetter of the University of Berlin.
In a research letter inyesterday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Huetter told of six other patients with HIV and various blood cancers who received similar transplants. He advised on some of the cases but did not perform the transplants.
One of the six patients was from Minneapolis. Two were from Germany and the others were from the Netherlands, Chile and Spain.
"They all died within a couple months of the transplant," likely from their underlying disease or the risky and gruelling transplant itself, Huetter said.
In some, there were signs that HIV had found another way into cells to overcome the natural resistance the donors had.
Specialists are working on other strategies to modify patients' own cells to try to defeat HIV.
Earlier this year, doctors reported another setback for a cure. A Mississippi baby who doctors hoped had been cured by very aggressive, early treatment showed new signs of the disease.
Associated Press
