The collapse of infant and child mortality

Assembled from 11 blocks · 2 evidence · 8 related

1. Story
2. The single largest component of the modern life expectancy gain, and the reason the headline number moved so far. In pre-transition populations something on the order of a quarter to a third of children died before age five; globally the under-five death rate is now below four percent and in the highest-income countries below half a percent. Because a death at age one removes some seventy or eighty years from the cohort mean and a death at age eighty removes only a few, shifting a death from infancy to old age moves life expectancy at birth enormously while moving the maximum age at death not at all. This is the arithmetic that makes almost every popular longevity claim ambiguous: the same headline supports both "we live much longer" and "old age has barely changed", and both are true of different quantities.
3. Knowledge
4. The collapse of infant and child mortality
5. Connections
6. The rise in life expectancy at birth
7. Sanitation and water treatment
8. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
9. Evidence
10. Supports the attribution of roughly half the urban mortality decline in major United States cities between 1900 and 1936 to clean water technologies. V55 verification basis: not retrieved; the exact percentages and their confidence intervals are unchecked and the headline figure is quoted approximately for that reason.
11. Supports the historical global life expectancy series used here — roughly thirty years around 1800 rising to the mid-sixties by 2001. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; volume and page numbers are deliberately given loosely because the producer could not confirm them.