The rise in life expectancy at birth

Assembled from 36 blocks · 2 evidence · 18 related

1. Story
2. The roughly two-fold increase in life expectancy at birth over roughly two centuries — from an estimated global average near thirty years around 1800 to about seventy-three before the COVID-19 pandemic. The phrase misleads almost everyone who reads it. Life expectancy at birth is an arithmetic mean over a whole synthetic cohort, so it is dominated by deaths at the youngest ages: a population in which a quarter of children die before their fifth birthday has a low life expectancy even if the adults who survive childhood commonly reach sixty or seventy. What changed was overwhelmingly the number of people dying young, not the age at which old people die. In England and Wales period life expectancy at birth was roughly forty-one years in the 1840s and is around eighty-one today, but life expectancy conditional on already having reached age sixty-five rose by a far smaller number of years over the same interval. The gain was produced by public health, infection control and, later, cardiovascular medicine — not by any intervention in the biology of ageing.
3. Knowledge
4. The rise in life expectancy at birth
5. The collapse of infant and child mortality
6. Sanitation and water treatment
7. Vaccination
8. Antibiotics
9. Connections
10. Antibiotics
11. The collapse of infant and child mortality
12. Sanitation and water treatment
13. Vaccination
14. Reversals in life expectancy
15. The pandemic erases a decade of life expectancy gains
16. The rise in life expectancy at birth
17. Alexander Fleming
18. Fleming observes lysis around a Penicillium colony
19. The first patient is treated with penicillin at Oxford
20. The rise in life expectancy at birth
21. Sanitation and water treatment
22. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
23. Edwin Chadwick
24. The rise in life expectancy at birth
25. The collapse of infant and child mortality
26. John Snow
27. The Broad Street pump handle is removed
28. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
29. The rise in life expectancy at birth
30. Edward Jenner
31. Jenner inoculates James Phipps with cowpox
32. The last naturally acquired smallpox case begins, at Marka
33. The World Health Assembly declares smallpox eradicated
34. Evidence
35. 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.
36. Supports the paired life expectancy and healthy life expectancy figures and the pandemic-era reversal. V55 verification basis: the report was NOT retrieved; the specific edition carrying the 2021 values must be identified and the figures checked by the curator.