Life :: US slips to 42nd position in life expectancy

The United States has fallen behind many industrialised nations in life expectancy rankings, although Americans are living longer than ever, a media report said.

Fortyone countries have gone past the US, which include not only Japan and many in Europe but also Jordan, Guam and the Cayman islands, the report said.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” Dr Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has been cited in the report.

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. The life expectancy now ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Centre for Health Statistics.

Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, followed by Japan, Macau, San Marino and Singapore.

The shortest life expectencies were clustered in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by an epidemic of HIV and AIDS, as well as famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.

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