China Overtakes US in Healthy Life Expectancy

A baby born in China today, is looking at a longer healthy life time than a baby born in the US. This is the shocking result of new evaluations by the WHO: for the first time, the order of these two countries has switched.

According to new data by the World Health Organisation WHO a child born in China in 2016 on average was looking at 68.7 healthy years ahead of it. For a child born in the US, these are only 68.5 years.

For the general life expectancy, the US is still ahead of China, in the US children born today are likely to live 78.5 years, in China 76.4 years. This means that in the US people get older but spend more of their life being sick.

Experts believe that China might even overtake the US for this statistics in the next 10 years. General life expectancy has continuously risen in China and is now higher than in other high-income countries. At the same time, the general life expectancy in the US has decreased after reaching a maximum in 2014 with a value of 79 years.

One reason for the failing health of Americans is the increasing number of drug-related deaths. Further factors are the consequences and complications of widespread overweight and obesity and a healthcare system, where not all citizens are able to afford the extremely high fees for doctor’s or hospital visits.

Posted on May 05, 2018 by Luitgard Holzleg

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.