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Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove


Improvements in public health and medicine have lengthened human survival, but science has yet to overcome ageing.

But Olshansky and others have long argued that this rate of improvement is not sustainable, despite more-optimistic forecasts that predict most children born in the twenty-first century would live for a 100 years or more 2. That evidence is based on the numbers of reported deaths in parts of the world with some of the highest current life expectancies, including Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, the United States and Spain. The study also revealed what Olshansky calls a “shocking” decline in the average life expectancy in the United States in the decade starting in 2010 — a trend seen in such a long-lived population only after extreme events, such as war, since 1900.

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Life expectancy rise