Life Expectancy Set To Hit 90 In South Korea, Study Predicts (nature.com) 108
According to a study published in the journal The Lancet, researchers have predicted that South Korea will likely become the first country where the average life expectancy will exceed 90 years. The researchers led by public-health researcher Majid Ezzati at Imperial College London used data from the World Health Organization and a suite of 21 statistical models they developed to figure out how life expectancy will change in 35 developed countries by 2030. Nature reports: Life expectancy is expected to increase in all 35 countries, in keeping with steady progress in recent decades, the team found. But it is South Korean women who will be living longest by 2030: there is a nearly 60% chance that their life expectancy at birth will exceed 90 years by that time, the team calculates. Girls born in the country that year can expect to live, on average, to nearly 91, and boys to 84, the highest in the world for both sexes. The nation's rapid improvement in life expectancy -- the country was ranked twenty-ninth for women in 1985 -- is probably down to overall improvements in economic status and child nutrition, the study notes, among other factors. South Koreans also have relatively equal access to health care, lower blood pressure than people in Western countries and low rates of smoking among women. As for the United States, the life expectancy is "predicted to be among the lowest of these countries by 2030; 80 for men (similar to the Czech Republic) and 83 for women (similar to Mexico)."
Re:The US ranks with Mexico? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Illegals cannot, by definition, work legally. Thus they can be paid under minimum wage, be abused, be unable to communicate with the OSHA inspector, etc. It's an awful situation and we need to help these people get back home.
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So that the Playstation Generation can do all that work? Construction, cleaning, picking cotton, etc.
It'll make good reality TV, that's for sure. I can't wait to see their tears.
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Nah, it's because the rich don't want to pay Americans what they're worth. They'd rather import illegals to work for $5/hour cash and ignore the labor laws, safety laws, overtime laws, etc. It's pure selfishness as well as disgust at the vile deplorable American people. It ain't ordinary folks who benefit from illegals.
You are worth what your job and output are worth, economically speaking. No more, no less.
Re: The US ranks with Mexico? (Score:4, Insightful)
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BS, and more BS (Score:3)
Not that long ago most of the "jobs American's won't do" were done exactly by Americans. Simple labor was done by high school kids (with record low labor participation rates today), Students on break from College (also record low labor participation), or entry level jobs for people not sure what to do with their careers (now mostly unemployed).
Employers given the ability to pay illegal workers less money and work them more hours has led to a lack of entry level and low level jobs. Why would a farmer hire
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Actually the number of Mexicans in the US has been dropping for years. That's because for years US politicians have been intent on turning us into a low-wage, non-industrialized nation run by and for an economic elite.
What's there to choose? They might as well go home.
The US has a real problem (Score:3)
As for the United States, the life expectancy is "predicted to be among the lowest of these countries by 2030; 80 for men (similar to the Czech Republic) and 83 for women (similar to Mexico)."
I'm quite horrified that all the commentary on the article is almost entirely sarcasm and jokes. In fact, this is relatively horrifying. Not only is the life expectancy in the U.S. currently less than that in any of the developed countries in Europe, it's decreasing.
This is bad. It's easy enough to make fun of Europe's universal health care, but apparently they're doing something right.
"The culprits for our declining years, the report says, were increases in mortality from heart disease, chronic lower r
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We're doing it wrong. (Score:2)
It's charmingly naive of you to think that our bad health has nothing to do with our health care system, probably the worst in the developed world, and definitely the most expensive in the developed world. (And I assume you've never been outside the U.S., since you seem to think nobody in the rest of the world smokes.)
But, whether in health care or in something else, we're at the bottom of the list in the developed world. Whatever it is we're
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You realize it's what people used to call an "Iron Curtain", right?
Look at Trump's policies carefully, which part of them doesn't look like old-style Communist Russia?
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Re:Not if your named Kim-Jong-Nam (Score:4, Funny)
Life expectancy for North Koreans in Malaysian airports is much shorter.
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This is a prediction of life expectancy for people that haven't been born yet.
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"And account for the higher drug prices coming to the rest of the world..."
No, drug prices in the US will fall to the open-market prices in the rest of the world.
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It's not quite that simple. Outside the US, governments pressure medicine suppliers to lower prices by threatening not to honor patents, so either the suppliers lower prices or competitors enter the field. In the US, the patents are honored, and the suppliers lobby or bribe legislators and bribe the FDA to keep generics unapproved.
A knowledgeable consumer who can afford to go to a place with low medicine prices can profit thereby. Getting low medicine prices generally in the US will require large and sustai
Best Korea Wins! (Score:5, Funny)
How much do you want to bet that North Korea releases a report of their own stating that life expectancy in their country now exceeds 95 years, only exceeded by their glorious leader, who is expected to live for two centuries?
Re:Best Korea Wins! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know a 90 and in excellent health for a 90 yo (Score:3)
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Absolutely. Most people don't like the idea of living that many years in poor health, limited and frail. But the current situation is we patch the problems that come with age and keep people alive.
On the other hand, if you look at the SENS strategy (http://www.sens.org), what they are trying to achieve is to revert the damage that age inflicts on people, so you live in good health and active and strong. What is important here is to increase the "healthspan". If lifespan is increased it is good too.
Please su
Calculating age (Score:2, Informative)
Let's not forget that in South Korea, you are considered to be 1 year old on the day you are born and your age increases by 1 on January 1st regardless of your date of birth. The average 5-year-old South Korean is 1.5 years younger than the average 5-year-old American.
While this has probably been accounted for, I wouldn't be so bold as to put such an oversight past today's "scientists".
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How else are hikikomori expected to live after their parents die? It's not like they can find work, when they can't leave the house, and crippling social anxiety prevents them from becoming highly paid youtube celebrities.
Not a surprise (Score:3)
If it wasn't for the draft... (Score:2)
...Serbia, along with the rest of the Balkans, would be much higher on that graph. Way above the USA. Not just below it.
Promaya kills. [laura-dennis.com]
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maybe it was just the work of London freemasonry, wanting to cause carnage to please their Osiris-Lucifer idol with blood sacrifice?
Thank God I read to the end of your post and its chillingly rational explanation of the Balkans Conflict. Until now I thought it had something to do with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the explosion of long-standing ethnic and religious conflicts hitherto suppressed under the rule of Tito.
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Hm, there's doesn't seem to be a "...the fuck?" moderation, so I guess I'll save that point for another discussion.
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I don't know why you "blame" brits and the Vatican.
The now separated states declared independence from "Yugoslavia". And the "Great Serbien Reich" had nothing better to do than to attack the states and draw them _all_ or in other words, each of them, into a full scale war with atrocities over atrocities.
The only ones who where lucky were the Slovenians who basically did first what the Serbs did in the other countries: they put all Serbian troops in mainly Slovenian barracks into prison, surrounded the mainl
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So, is the bark worse than the bite?
No big deal (Score:2)
On Aurora and Solaria life expectancy has hit 350 and nobody seems to worry about it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
It is a dog's life. (Score:1)
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While dog (Kaygogi) is eaten, it's rather uncommon. I lived there for six years, and only came across it once when my landlord invited me to their elderly grandmother's birthday.
I haven't read the article, but my knee-jerk reaction to the headline is disbelief. Korea is highly polluted, with a very large smoking population, and tuberculosis was much more common there than in the US. Many homes are heated using "Ondal", a form of charcoal, smoking out into the open air. Of the roughly 50 countries I've bee
So, America might have a lower life expectancy.. (Score:5, Funny)
So, America might have a lower life expectancy but we make it up by weighing three times as much. If you use "pound-years" as a metric, America on average is probably more than triple Koreans.
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The cardinal rule of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison.
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Why single out one cause, when there's obviously many.
Take food. I live near a supermarket that is probably three times the size of the one my parents went to, but the produce section is smaller, the meat and dairy sections about the same size. The surplus acreage is taken up with cheap, calorie dense, no-preparation convenience food.
Or the fact that Amercians spend more time in cars than they used to, on average over 290 hours a year.
Here's another interesting fact: research shows that the portion size y
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The suburbs I grew up in didn't have Netflix...but then I grew up before the internet. Our nearest fast food place was a couple miles away, and we had a baseball field at the end of our street where my friends and I used to play ball. We spent more of our waking hours outside than in. I'd typically put 1000 miles on my bicycle during the summer.
So, while you may blame the 'burbs, I'd argue that it's a generational issue.
Fan death (Score:4, Funny)
That's what the rest of the world gets for not taking fan death seriously!
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I wanted to mod you either +1 funny or +1 informative, but instead decided to post instead.
My first thought was "who's killing sports fans in Korea?" as I remembered a story about a stadium with robot audiences there.
Then I googled the phrase and found immediate hits (p'raps previous /.'s like me looking it up primed google's cache).
So I thought that it maybe was related to the warnings about their charcoal stoves and heating. When I was in SK in a previous millennium we were seriously briefed about keeping
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Haha interesting, I would have never thought of sports fans killing each other... Sad to find out that is real and causes actual death. That takes the concept of sore winners and sore losers much too far.
Cue "in Korea" jokes (Score:2)
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US Life Expectancy is 91.9 years (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're a woman in the top 1% by income. If you're a man in the top 1% it's 88.8 years.
If you're middle class you live about 78.3 years if you're a man, which is big step up from 1980, probably because of smoking. If you're a woman you live 79.7 years, a decline of a few months since 1980.
Now if you're a poor your life expectancy has declined since 1980, to 76.1 for men and 78.3 for women.
So here's the picture: if you're rich, medical advances since 1980 have increased your expected lifespan by about seven years. But those advances haven't had any effect on middle class lifespans. If you're poor you apparently are having difficulty paying for medical care at all, which is not surprising because health care costs have consistently outpaced inflation since the mid-70s. If you're a working poor American health care inflation meant you basically screwed by the 2000s: you were too rich for Medicaid, to poor to avoid medical care.
One more thing: US has a GINI coefficient (measure of income disparity) of 45. That's the highest in the industrialized world, and much higher than it's low point of 34 in 1969. Basically all of the income growth sicne 1990 have gone to the top quintile, in fact the lion's share to the top 5%. People at the 80th percentile by income and below have seen basically zero income growth when adjusted for inflation. And since health care inflation rises faster than inflation, it means 80% of the the US has seen a cut in its disposable income.
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About 1/3, according to statisticians.
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With "global warming" and over population (Score:2)
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You'd think scientist would be pushing for LOWERING the lifespan of humans...
I'm not sure why you would think this. In general, scientists are not assholes, despite what the blogosphere would have you believe.
I can't assert that about Slashdot commenters, on the other hand.
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plenty of scientists and engineers are "assholes" and are engaged in work that shortens human life. think harder about all the products that shorten human life, ruin environment, enable war for power and profit rather than defense, etc.
In other news... (Score:2)
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