A study from the American Journal of Public Health says the average life expectancy in the United States has fallen behind a huge number of countries. The results of the study said the disadvantage of life expectancy that began in the 1950s has gotten worse in the last 40 years
Steven Woolf is the director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of the study. He said the problem is much bigger than he thought it would be when he began the study, and that other countries are performing much better than the U.S.
Improvements in sanitation and the advent of easy-to-access vaccines generated big increases in life expectancy in the U.S. in the early 20th Century. But it started slipping downhill in the 1950s.
- Increases in life expectancy in the U.S. dropped from 0.21 years per year from 1950 to 1954
- They fell to 0.1 years per year from 1955 to 1973
- Things improved to .034 years per year from 1974 to 1982
- Increases fell again from 0.15 years per year from 1983 to 2009 to 0.06 years from 2010 to 2019
Life expectancy fell by 0.97 years per year from 2020 to 2021.
Woolf’s report found that 56 countries did better than the U.S. in life expectancy from 1933 to 2021.
The South and Midwest had the slowest life expectancy growth which caused the U.S. to take a huge overall life expectancy hit. Areas like the North and West did the best and states like Hawaii and New York have some of the healthiest people in the world.
Source link: The Hill — https://bit.ly/3IUOcLW
