Why People Are Living Longer In Low-Income Countries
The WHO attributes the increase to a decline in child mortality rates.
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CREDIT: AP
Average life expectancies around the globe have increased by six years since 1990, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO). But even more surprising is another finding of the report: life expectancy is growing more than twice as fast for low-income countries compared to high-income nations like the United States.
A boy born in 2012 can expect to live to an average of 68 years, a girl to 73.
High-income countries’ life expectancies increased since 1990 by an average of 5.1 years, versus a gain in low-income countries of 9 years. That means in low-income countries, life expectancy is increasing an average of 3 days a week, or 10 hours per day, according to the report.
The WHO attributes high gains in life expectancy in low-income countries to a decline in child mortality rates. “An important reason why global life expectancy has improved so much is that fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan in a statement.
The infant mortality rate, which is six times higher in Africa than Europe, has dropped in the last several years. According to a joint study by WHO, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank, deaths of children under five years old decreased from 12 million in 1990 to 6.6 million in 2012.
“This trend is a positive one. Millions of lives have been saved,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake when the joint study was released last September. “And we can do still better. Most of these deaths can be prevented, using simple steps that many countries have already put in place.”
Increasing availability of mosquito nets and vaccinations against preventable diseases have been essential in lowering the infant mortality rate in African nations, according to WHO.
Of the 24 countries where the average person now lives more than 10 extra years, half were in Africa (with the highest gain in Liberia, 19.7 years, followed by Ethiopia, Maldives, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, and Rwanda). The remaining half were in South East Asia or the Middle East.
But the recently released study also showed that large gains in life expectancy by low-income countries hasn’t closed the gap between high-income and low-income countries. Men living in low-income countries live on average 15.6 years less than in high-income countries. Women live 18.9 years less.
Several African countries still have a life expectancy lower than 55 years, including Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. And countries with the top life expectancies are high-income–men live the longest in Iceland (81.2 years), followed by Switzerland and Australia. Japanese women live longest, followed by women in Spain, Switzerland, and Singapore. The United States ranked 26th for life expectancy in 2013.
Chan said in high-income countries, the gain in life expectancy was due to a decline in tobacco use as well as success in “tackling noncommunicable diseases” like heart disease, according to Dr. Ties Boerma, director of the Department of Health Statistics and Information Systems at WHO. Boerma said richer countries are improving their monitoring and managing of high blood pressure.
The study also showed that in both low-income and high-income countries, women live longer (six years longer in high-income countries, three years longer in low-income). The top causes of deaths are coronary heart disease, lower respiratory infections like pneumonia, and strokes.
Abigail Bessler is an intern at ThinkProgress.
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Railroad CEO Wants To Send Oil Trains Through Town Where Derailment Killed 47 Last Year
Oil trains could soon be traveling through Lac Mégantic, the tiny Quebec town that was the scene of one of the deadliest train accidents in Canadian history last July.
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Tankers left after the Lac Megantic disaster in July 2014.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Oil trains could soon be traveling through Lac Mégantic, the tiny Quebec town that was the scene of one of the deadliest train accidents in Canadian history last July.
The new owner of the railroad company responsible for the Lac Mégantic oil train disaster, a derailment which killed 47 people and destroyed much of the town’s center, said this week that within the next ten days he wants to have an agreement with Lac Mégantic officials to restart oil train shipments through the town.
John Giles, CEO of the Central Maine and Quebec railway who on Thursday purchased the U.S. assets of the bankrupt Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, said the company plans to invest in safety improvements before restarting oil shipments 18 months from now, spending $10 million on rail improvements over the next two summers.
“In the interest of safety, and I think being sensitive toward a social contract with Lac-Mégantic, we have chosen not to handle crude oil and dangerous goods through the city until we’ve got the railroad infrastructure improved, and made more reliable,” Giles told The Associated Press.
Giles didn’t address a desire expressed by Lac Mégantic’s mayor to divert the oil trains around the city, so to try to prevent another deadly derailment.
The July disaster in Lac Mégantic occurred after an unattended, parked train carrying Bakken crude came loose and barreled downhill into the town. More than 60 cars derailed and many exploded, destroying the town’s center and spilling more than 26,400 gallons of oil into the Chaudiere River. Last week, the Quebec government released the results of a study that found that, nearly a year after the disaster, the river is still contaminated with oil. So far, the province has spent $16 million on river cleanup.
“We’re talking about not only the water itself, but along the banks, and everything that’s involved with that,” Quebec Environment Minister David Heurtel said. “It’s going to take time, but we want to do the right thing … it’s a long process and it is very costly.”
Three Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway workers are charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence — one for each person killed — for their role in the disaster, charges that several of the town’s residents say should be aimed at the railway owners, not the workers.
“We can’t judge these people — they work for the MMA,” Danielle Champagne, whose daughter Karine died in the disaster, told the Canadian Press. “These aren’t the bosses of the MMA.”
The Lac Mégantic disaster has sparked calls for stricter regulations on oil-by-rail shipments, a method of shipping fuel that’s boomed in the U.S. in the last five years. In Canada, oil-by-rail is also booming — shipments rose by by 83 percent in the last quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012. The boom has led to accidents in both countries since the Lac Mégantic disaster — in January, a derailment in New Brunswick, Canada spilled oil and propane and forced 150 from their homes. And in April, an oil train derailed, caught fire and spilled oil into the St. James River in Virginia. That derailment was just the latest of a string of derailments this year in the U.S.
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