Americans are living longer
For the first time, U.S. life expectancy has surpassed 78 years, the government reported Wednesday, although the United States continues to lag behind about 30 other countries in estimated life span and in some parts of the country life expectancy actually declined. Life expectancy is up for both men and women, and Whites and Blacks in the United States, but Black men still had the shortest lifespan - 70 years. The increase in life expectancy is planly due to better living and to falling rates in almost all the leading causes of death, federal health officials said. The average life expectancy for babies born in 2006 was about four months greater than for children born in 2005. However, in a report published in last month’s Public Libraries of Science Medicine, government figures reported that life expectancy actually declined by 1.3 years in some regions of the country, particularly for women living in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. Japan has the longest life expectancy — 83 years for those born in 2006, according to World Health Organization data. Switzerland and Australia were also near the top of the list. “The international comparisons are not that appealing, but we may be in the process of catching up,” said Samuel Preston, a University of Pennsylvania demographer. He is co-chairman of a National Research Council panel looking at why America’s life expectancy is lower than other nations’. The new U.S. data, released Wednesday, come from the National Center for Health Statistics. It’s a preliminary report of 2006 numbers, based on data from more than 95 percent of the death certificates collected that year. Life expectancy is the period a child born in 2006 is expected to live, assuming mortality trends stay constant. The 2006 increase is due mainly to falling mortality rates for nine of the 15 leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, accidents and diabetes. “I think the most surprising thing is that we had declines in just about every major cause of death,” said Robert Anderson, who oversaw work on the report for the health statistics center. The overall death rate fell from 799 per 100,000 in 2005 to about 776 the following year. As for the poor life expectancy in the South and Appalachia, health officials say people lacked access to quality healthcare as well as the lack of public health initiatives to control smoking, diabetes and obesity. “It’s probably a sign that things we know how to do extremely well are not reaching the people who need it the most,” Majid Ezzati a Harvard University population and life expectancy expert told NPR. “The fact that its geographically located means that there’s something [going on] beyond individual choice.”

TAGS: Blacks, expectancy, lif, men, Whites, women

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