Nowadays, do peopel live longer?
In the U.S. and other countries?
Or do we have more elderly because of the baby boom(all grown up now).
WAG: People live longer, but not because we’ve evolved appreciably longer lives in the past couple thousand years, but because there are better treatments nowadays for things that would have been fatal in the past.
Nutrition and modern medicine (especially treatment of infection) are all it takes.
The average life span in the U.S. has been creeping up steadily for since it has existed as a country. The same trend has been going on around the world. The most developed countries seeing the most benefit. The only places that are in regression right now (that I am aware of) are areas where the gov’t has been denying that AIDS is caused by a virus and doing pretty much nothing to educate its people or doing much of anything else to slow its progress.
Here is a nice wee graph of rising life expectancy in the UK in the past 150 years or so…(on the left)
In 1900 the average life expectancy (at birth) in the United States was about 47 years. Today it’s about 73. A lot of that increase came in the first half of the 20th century through controlling infectious diseases like diptheria and whooping courgh that killed a lot of children. A lot came from improved sanitary conditions.
At the other end of the spectrum, there have been advances in the treatment of cancer and heart disease which typically show up later in life.
If you can get through childhood without a fatal disease or accident, you stand a very good chance of a very long life.
What must be kept in perspective is that looking at the “average” alone tends to miss much of the picture here. It would appear that the “normal” lifespan has been about 70 for hundreds or thousands of years. What dragged the average down - and where the real improvement has been - was childhood diseases and epidemics of communicable diseases. Other than in those areas, the improvement has been very small.
The significance of this is that any future improvements are also likely to be very small, if they even exist at all. We may even regress, should the development of new antibiotics fail to keep pace with the evolution of new bacteria.
Yes, IzzyR’s point is valid.
Stated another way: It doesn’t appear that the “maximum lifespan” has changed much or at all during the last couple hundred years.
What has changes is that how much of that maximum the average person achieves.
There may be some things in the medical pipeline that will change this statement. Then again, maybe not. It will be interesting at least.
You might want to read The Truth About Human Aging at Scientific American’s site. Also, the book The Quest For Immortality by Jay Olshansky talks about many of the same things IzzyR and scotth said.
Basically, our bodies get worn out after 80 or 85 years, but the average life expectancy, or average age at death, used to be heavily weighted by infant mortality and infectious disease. Now that we’ve almost eliminated those, we still have accidents and other diseases to pull it down, but it’s not going to climb much higher than it is now, unless we fundamentally can re-engineer the way the body ages.
Lots of people seem to think that since the life expectancy 100 years ago was 45, that people would live normal lives and then be “old” in their early forties and expect to die soon. That’s not how it was. Take a look at historical people, such as America’s founders. Many lived to be pretty old. But they were just the lucky ones to have survived to adulthood and avoided death by serious injury or disease.
It seems to me this opinion is very unfair. The areas where tghe life expectancy is dropping at an distressing rate are the countries which are too poor for the people to afford the very costly treatmentfor AIDS. A large part of Africa is devastated by this disease, with frightening infection rates. It’s true that some governments consistently buried their head into the sand on this dreadful issue, but even where the governments are willing to act, there’s not much they can do (I’m going to add something that the OP, knowing her beliefs,will probably not appreciate, but organized religions definitely have a responsability in the situation in Africa by lobbying against the use/promotion of condoms)
And yes, the life expectancy is still growing in industrialized countries. I don’t know the exact life expectancy in the US, but I know that it increases roughly at the same rate than here : one more year every four years, roughly. And it has been so for quite a long time.
The only place I’m aware of where the government has denied that AIDS is caused by a virus is South Africa - and even there, that would appear to have changed.
Life expectancy has also dipped in Russia, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it has also declined (temporarily) in other countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain. In Russia the decline has two major causes. First, the collapse of the Soviet system left some areas without adequate working health care and sanitation systems, so diseases like tuberculosis and diphtheria came back with a vengeance. Second, alcoholism, which has long been a problem in Russia, increased with the stresses of abrupt change, leading to an increase in alcohol-related deaths among young and middle-aged adults.
As far as I know, the decline has been reversed as things begin to settle down to a new normality.
Lifespans are like intelligence: we aren’t evolving to be longer-lived or smarter, we’re just getting better at eliminating things that killed children and made us dumb.
Ah, I love technology. Nostalgia is for idiots.
I agree. Time for your rectal transplant.
It is quite fair. The problem is magnitudes worse in those countries due to a full decade of denial of the causes of AIDS and refusal to educate their populace. The U.S. could not afford to deal with problem some of the South African nations have got themselves if we had done the same. The treatments we have aren’t all that effective but are better than nothing. Prevention has played a far larger role in keeping the death rate down here than any other cause. They have known how to prevent it as long as we.
South Africa could be looking at a 1% or less infection rate instead of the 25% rate that exists in some of the areas.
clairobscur , you don’t know all my beliefs.
I think its great to ship as many condoms to anywhere to help spread the disease.
Did you mean "to help stop the spread or what you actually wrote?
I wasn’t typing what i was thinking.
Of course I meant stop the disease!!