Fewer children die from infectious diseases, and seniors can expect to live longer.
Shripad Tuljapurkar and colleagues of Mountain View Research, Los Altos, California, now report that the increasing life expectancy of people in the G7 countries is significantly more than official projections admit. Food for thought for social services and insurance companies. The reason seems to lie in our changing assumptions about the likelihood of death among people of different age groups. Until relatively recently this was borne out by changes in life-history patterns in the industrialized nations, where a focus on public health, sanitation, and the health of children and pregnant women has dramatically reduced mortality rates, especially among the young. But the demise of childhood infectious diseases has uncovered a panoply of afflictions, such as heart disease and stoke, that prey particularly on the elderly.