Your life expectancy, you should live so long
The government recently turned loose a bunch of information about Americans’ deaths in 2017. I guess the people who keep track of such things decided to wrap it up before they bump into another year at the end of the month.
The news is slightly not good. More people died last year than in the previous year, and predicted life expectancy declined. There were more suicides last year than in any year of the last 50.
The number of people who die in a given year doesn’t concern me much personally since I’m aware that I will contribute to the statistic one of these years. Life expectancy is of more interest. For many years, life expectancy rose a few months every year in the United States. Since 2015, it has been declining.
Last year, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, an average newborn American male baby could expect to live 76.1 years, down a 10th of a year from 2016. Life expectancy for women in 2017 was 81.1 years, same as the previous year.
The last serious declines in life expectancy came in the years of the first World War and the 1918 national influenza epidemic. Overall American life expectancy in 1918 was age 39.
These days, according to some sources, though there are variations, the five leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, accidents and Alzheimer’s disease.
The respiratory diseases, often abbreviated COPD, include such breathing problems as emphysema, chronic bronchitis and asthma. Alzheimer’s was first identified in 1906, but it only came into modern medical consciousness about 40 years ago.
But life expectancy is a number that averages out while you wait. A person can die at age one or 101. Expected age of a newborn wobbles between childbirth, which happens once, and dying, which can happen any time.
Reasons suggested for why people live longer now than in the past include better access to primary medical care, improved health care provided to mothers and babies, availability of immunizations, improvements in motor vehicle safety, clean water supply and waste removal, safer and more nutritious foods and rapid rate of growth in the general standard of living.
However, while all those lifeextending improvements were arriving, so were new ways to die. Life expectancies of centuries past didn’t include airplane crashes or getting hit by a bus or atomic bombs.
About 226,000 people died in two days at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was then. Lately, the World Health Organization ranks Japan first in expected longevity. The United States is 31st.
Both of my grandfathers were born in 1862, and as nearly as I could tell from meager statistics, they could have been expected at birth to live to about 40. One made it to 73, and the other to 85. My mother lived 50 years longer than her expectance at birth.
Predictors didn’t expect as much when previous generations of ancestors were born. I suppose that the improvements mentioned above have been making the difference.
According to current National Center for Health statistical guessers, I have already lived 30 years longer than expected at birth, but I plan to function more or less normally for a few more years.
Who knows? Reading up on life expectancy, I find that charts and figures available on the subject disagree more than Donald and Hilary or Eagles and Redskins, so please don’t email me and tell me I have something wrong.
Last year, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, an average newborn American male baby could expect to live 76.1 years, down a 10th of a year from 2016. Life expectancy for women in 2017 was 81.1 years, same as the previous year.