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China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
- theparanoid 8y agoThe US lifespan is decreasing due to opioid overdoses. Similar to Russia in the 90's with alcohol.
- i_feel_great 8y agoPardon my utter ignorance/disbelief - are opioids killing/debilitating that many people to get this result?
- bitexploder 8y agoNo. I would guess the biggest factor is our number one killer, heart disease. Healthy lifespan.... People live a long time with heart disease, but they are never healthy again. Same with many terminal cancers, etc.
- chimeracoder 8y ago> No. I would guess the biggest factor is our number one killer, heart disease. Healthy lifespan.... People live a long time with heart disease, but they are never healthy again. Same with many terminal cancers, etc. Those are the leading causes of death, but not the leading causes of the recent decline in life expectancy (heart disease has not contributed to a dramatic decrease is life expectancy). The recent decrease is due to deaths from drug overdoses. They aren't the leading cause of death, but they have caused the life expectancy to decrease in the last few years.
- adventured 8y ago60,000+ people are overdosing in the US. The Fentanyl China is dumping into the US killed 20,000 people in 2016, up from 3,000 just a few years prior. By comparison, Cocaine killed 10,000, Heroin killed 15,000, and prescription opiods killed 14,000. The reason it disproportionately impacts life expectancy, is because a lot of the people overdosing are young. If you suddenly have 250,000 people under 40 years of age overdosing over five years, you're going to see it in the life expectancy numbers even if your population is 320m. The small increases you'd expect to see in life expectancy year by year otherwise, will evaporate. To get a picture of the overall health impact (non overdose deaths), one would need to look at how many additional addicts the opioid explosion has caused (eg in the last 10-15 years), study the health impact over time on those people, and so on.
- kawaiikouhai 8y agoSome quick maths. an increase of +17k Fentanyl deaths in a year. Let's say they all died at 20. Of the ~2.5million annual deaths, which average to be life expectancy (78.8 years). Life expectancy goes down to 78.4. A net change of 0.4 years is not insignificant, but I think you're ignoring the elephant in the room (China's rapid development in the last decade). On another vein, I'd argue overdosing on drugs is an intrinsic part to the American experience.
- nostrademons 8y agoThat matches the observed life expectancy numbers in the article - U.S. life expectancy decreased from 79 years to 78.5 years.
- selimthegrim 8y agoIn the eighties Iran used to blame its drug problems on the US - I don’t think blaming the US’ on China has any more logical footing
- DenisM 8y agoFetanyl is a prescription opioid, why did you separate the two? And what does it have to with China "dumping" it? FDA approved Fetanyl and American doctors are prescribing it. It's on us to reign it in.
- radicaldreamer 8y agoWith a lot of the fentanyl flowing into the US market being made in China, it's almost like a reverse opium war between the east/west.
- Iv 8y agoMake no mistake: the opioid epidemics is pretty much a self-inflicted harm. It is what happens when you underfund actually useful drug programs and let corruption (relabelled 'lobbying') by pharmaceutical companies run unchecked. So yes, sure, China will make business if they can, but they are not "out there to get you".
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoAlso blame the patent system, as implemented.
- 8note 8y agoin both cases, it could be said as "out to make money" not "out to get you" it just so happens that it's always very profitable to sell opium.
- Iv 8y agoI remember a businessman from Hong-Kong, 15 years ago, telling me that as soon as USA realizes China is better at business than they are, they will switch overnight to hating capitalism and free trade. At the time I thought it was a bit exaggerated.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> as soon as USA realizes China is better at business than they are This is jingoistic at best. Let's ignore that "goodness at business" is an ambiguous and multidimensional metric. Or that defining a "better" direction is similarly dubious. The argument is simply "anything you can do I can do better." To that, the counterfactual is Ricardian comparative advantage. More broadly, every culture says such things in times of growth and decline. It is never true. But a changing baseline combined with localisation bias reproduces it often. It is a case where the utterance of a thing is more meaningful than the thing itself.
- kawaiikouhai 8y agoA quick google search would show this is untrue. Opioid overdoses kill 40,000 a year. 2.7 million Americans die per year. Even if you were talking about a decrease in healthy lifespan, Opioids do not generally cause a person to transition from healthy to unhealthy (they are prescribed to treat a preexisting condition). Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
- nostrademons 8y agoThat's not necessarily a disproof - if opioids are killing people who are disproportionately young, then they could have an outsize effect on life expectancy. Say life expectancy is 79 years. If a new cause of death occurs that affects 10% of the population and kills, on average, at age 78, then life expectancy goes down to 78.9. If a new cause of death occurs that affects 10% of the population and kills at age 29, then life expectancy goes down to 74. Same reason that infant mortality had a disproportionate affect on life expectancy: the numbers of deaths might be small, but the reduction in lifespan is large. Personally I would bet on obesity being a bigger contributor to declining lifespans than opioids, but I'm just showing that raw numbers of deaths cannot automatically disprove the hypothesis that a decline in lifespan is due to opioids.
- amsilprotag 8y agoThere's a great breakdown here [0]. The first chart shows age 15-44 deaths going up ~10% from 2010 to 2016. The third chart shows drug overdose deaths going up 50%(15-24), 80% (25-34), and 60% (35-44) from 2012 to 2016. [0] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/05/lawler-us-deaths-jumped-in-2017.html http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/05/lawler-us-deaths-j...
- OscarCunningham 8y agoFor a cause of death affecting 40000/2700000 it could only reduce life expectancy from 79 to 77.8, even if all the victims were age 0. EDIT: I suppose it could be lowered a bit more if all those who died were those who would otherwise have lived longest.
- 0x00000000 8y agoI think obesity has more to do with it. A lot of people seem to want to normalize being overweight but I really don't think that leads anywhere productive, especially when it comes to affordable health coverage.
- humanrebar 8y agoI don't see many serious people advocating for normalizing obesity. I also don't think there's a clear productive outcome to obesity issues. Telling fat people to burn more calories than they eat is like telling poor people to save more dollars than they spend. Yeah, it's the outcome we want, but it's not a mechanism to solve the problem. A government program to influence calorie consumption is as distasteful as a government program to closely monitor home economics.
- ascorbic 8y agoI'd imagine that opioid overdoses can be added to the figures of those caused by the US healthcare system, being largely driven by prescribing practices and the warped incentives that drive them.
- jk2323 8y agoFor a developing country to increase life span in general, it makes most sense to decrease child mortality and increase vaccinations. Old and sick people don't matter much for the statistic, since a child dying with 2 years is much worse for the statistic than an old persons getting one year less out of life.
- baybal2 8y agoAnd US has universal health insurance, while China doesn't
- asdsa5325 8y agoUS does not have universal health insurance.
- phil248 8y agoThe US does not have universal health insurance, but it makes up for it with atrocious diets and sedentary lifestyles.
- tropdrop 8y agoDo you mean a penalty that one pays if they DON'T pay for some private insurance every month? Because that's actually what we have and it should not be confused with universal health insurance
- briandear 8y agoActually we don’t. The individual mandate was repealed.
- drcode 8y agoI assume the WHO relies on local census & medical data to generate these statistics (the Reuters piece doesn't have a citation on ths) so I'd take this data with a grain of salt until we hear more details about the methodology.
- adventured 8y agoI agree. Although, it also wouldn't be terribly surprising for China to pass the US on this metric. When you look at the obesity numbers: US 36%, New Zealand 31%, Canada 29%, Australia 29%, UK 28%, Israel 26%, Ireland 25% Thailand 10%, Indonesia 7%, China 6%, Philippines 6%, South Korea, 5%, Vietnam 2% Vietnam's life expectancy will overtake the US in the next 10-15 years as well most likely (they're about three years behind). In most cases if you prevent people from starving or suffering serious malnutrition, provide a basic level of healthcare & sanitation, and have single digit obesity levels, you'll almost automatically see 75-80 year life expectancies. South Korea's life expectancy went from 65 years, to 82 years currently, from just 1980 to 2015. They passed the US around 2003. South Korea's GDP per capita was $14,000 at that time, versus $40,000 for the US. One would expect China to have no problem replicating that. It's a small wonder life expectancies in the developed, high obesity countries are as high as they are. The US is no doubt expending hundreds of billions of dollars extra per year on healthcare as a consequence of its obesity level (cancer, disability, diabetes, etc).
- lallysingh 8y agoOh and the absurd costs of healthcare in the US
- ams6110 8y agoObesity seems to be a side effect of prosperity, so China will probably be next.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago小胖子 is already part of Chinese vocabulary, it is already happening in the cities, though nowhere near on an American scale.
- kizer 8y agoHealthy and subject to a "social credits" system. I'd rather be morbidly obese than have the government force me to play a social status game.
- perfmode 8y agoin the united states, the means of control are hidden rather than apparent.
- dv_dt 8y agoCase in point, the no-fly list in the US. No one publically knows if they're on it, there is similarly no means to appeal being on it. At least one would know if they held a poor Chinese social credit rating - though I don't know what resolution mechanism they might have for mistakes either.
- hueving 8y agoI can't be put on the no-fly list for shoveling bigmacs down my throat.
- dv_dt 8y agoHow do you know? The criteria are not public either.
- Simulacra 8y agoRespectfully I disagree. Some airlines will make you buy a second seat, but if there is no second seat, you could be bumped from that airplane due to incredible obesity. Likewise, with enough big Macs, you might grow to such large size that you present safety issues for other passengers. As such, you might be denied boarding.
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoThat’s a false equivalency. The parent said that you won’t be put on a no-fly list for being morbidly obese. That’s not the same as the airline not being able to accommodate you because of your extreme body size.
- asdsa5325 8y agoHow is this article related to Hacker News?
- swebs 8y ago>Hacker News Guidelines >What to Submit >On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- noncoml 8y ago"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThat might have been a relevant metric 10 years ago, but all sorts of tech and health news now gets screen time.
- asdsa5325 8y agoI posted a BBC article about mental health and it received complaints about being off-topic and it was removed.
- yesenadam 8y agoProbably an article's involving the USA increases its perceived on-topicness. Although a large majority of people on here aren't from or in the USA, 'Americans' on here often talk as if it's a 99.5% US discussion taking place on US soil.
- ludston 8y agoCongratulations to China and the Chinese people who have managed to measurably improve their livelihoods over the last few decades.
- valarauca1 8y ago没有共产党就没有新中国
- iamconfused 8y agoOr maybe it wouldn't have taken so long. ;p
- valarauca1 8y agoIf you consider 50 years to go from having <10% literacy to >99%, while also stabilizing an entire nation's food supply, and becoming an economic super power on par with EU/US then I hate to see what you consider fast. Oh we should also talk about their entire coastal region we’re devistaed by land war and Japanese occupation.
- ThinkingGuy 8y agoI don't have a source for this, but my understanding is that much of the improvement in China's literacy rate came from the government's redefining of "literate" down to about a 1st or 2nd grade school level. Still, I can't help but be happy at how so many people's lives have improved so greatly in such a short time.
- platinumrad 8y agoSimplified Chinese made a huge difference. It's one of the few undeniably good things to come from the CCP, although adopting a phonetic alphabet might have been even better.
- nimrod0 8y agoThere were horrible problems that derailed progress, it's pointless to deny them. On the other hand, some of the suffering came externally, like sanctions and embargoes designed to make life miserable and induce the country to fail/the regime to collapse. Also military threats that depleted meager resources and made normal investment impossible. What can be said is that, given this set of very difficult challenges, whether self-induced or not, the outcome, such as it is, is a commendable one.
- gggibi08 8y agoThis study is backward looking; it hasn't taken account of China's current set of factors that could skew the lifespan down tremendously for average Chinese citizens. Factors such as 1.) Air pollution. In your typical big cities, e.g Beijing, it average AQI 100-150 for the past 10+ years https://young-0.com/airquality/ https://young-0.com/airquality/. In other lower tiered cities, it average between 50-100. Just to compare, WHO recommend only AQI of 25 in 24 hour span to be ok for your health. And even though recently Beijing's AQI has gone down, what the government has done is they pushed the coal-burning factories into the countryside, and moving the pollutions there. 2.) Water pollution. Cancer causing ingredients have been found in several water sources. for example: "Shanghai water supply hit by 100-tonne wave of garbage " - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/23/shanghai-water-supply-hit-by-100-tonne-wave-of-garbage https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/23/shanghai-water... https://qz.com/113751/only-3-of-shanghais-river-and-lake-water-is-clean-enough-for-household-use/ https://qz.com/113751/only-3-of-shanghais-river-and-lake-wat... 3.) Smoking/smokers everywhere. "Smoking Will Kill 200 Million In China This Century" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/smoking-will-kill-200-million-in-china-this-century-report-says_us_58f26221e4b0da2ff8612b55 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/smoking-will-kill-200-m...
- chrisseaton 8y agoHow is it backward looking? Do you think the data is wrong? Or interpreted wrong? You’ve presented some news articles about issues in China but I don’t know how these affects overall life expectancy in combination with all the other factors. Do you? They seem to think they’ve taken account of likely future trends and ongoing health issues because they’ve said: > Chinese newborns can look forward to 68.7 years of healthy life ahead of them Do you think they’re mistaken somehow?
- ItsMe000001 8y ago> How is it backward looking? I don't have an opinion about China, but just in general, I'm sure they don't have data from the future :-) I would say it is okay to say that about such predictions. There are others that don't rely as much on past data, but especially this kind of prediction surely is entirely based on numbers from the past, or do we have a model that reliably predicts those outcomes from at least present data (i.e. less data from people, but that it uses data about the circumstances, like amount & quality of sanitation and food)? If the model is purely based on human population statistics it's 100% past.
- dynofuz 8y agoSource http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/hale/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/...
- johan_larson 8y agoAny idea how honestly China reports these statistics?
- tysonzni 8y agoI don't know how China collect its public health statistics, but its economics numbers have been extensively studied. And the consensus is that its official GDP growth figures were overstated historically (by as much as 67%), but had been mostly accurate post-1996. Study: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s...
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoIt’s not surprising. The stereotypical American is obese and not too intelligent when it comes to dealing with that problem. See the whole “fat shaming” movement for a prime example of this.
- diefunction 8y agoyes, China surpass US in a new sphere. When would those comparisons stop ??
- patrickg_zill 8y agoDrop out the recent immigrants, as China has virtually no net immigration. Do the numbers change?
- tysonzni 8y agoNo it does not. From NIH study: (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5026916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5026916/) >We use high-quality linked Social Security and Medicare records to estimate life tables for the older U.S. population over the full range of birth regions. In 2000–2009, the foreign-born had a 2.4-year advantage in life expectancy at age 65 relative to the U.S.-born, with Asian-born subgroups displaying exceptionally high longevity. Foreign-born individuals who migrated more recently had lower mortality compared with those who migrated earlier. Nonetheless, we also find remarkable similarities in life expectancy among many foreign-born subgroups that were born in very different geographic and socioeconomic contexts (e.g., Central America, western/eastern Europe, and Africa).
- esturk 8y agoSo what I'm getting from this statistic is that in China, if you get old and sick, that's probably the end. In US, if you get old and sick, you might have a few more years. Albeit with lower QoL. I'm actually ok with that.
- beedogs 8y agoAnd in any other Western country, you'll both live longer and have a higher quality of life.
- wazoox 8y agoThe United States was one of only five countries, along with Somalia, Afghanistan, Georgia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where healthy life expectancy at birth fell in 2016... Meanwhile U.S. life expectancy is falling, having peaked at 79 years in 2014, the first such reversal for many years... This is also inequality and poverty taking their toll. May it be sign? In 1976, Emmanuel Todd announced the coming fall of USSR from its dropping life expectancy and other poor demographic results.
- i_am_nomad 8y agoPoverty is one of the US’s major imports.
- skookumchuck 8y ago> life expectancy at birth This can be affected by how one defines birth. The US, for example, goes to fairly heroic lengths to save premature babies, and counts those that fail as infant mortality, whereas other countries may classify them as miscarriages. A more portable figure would be life expectancy at one year.
- pjc50 8y ago.. but is apparently fairly terrible at saving mothers? https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/15/opinions/op-ed-christy-turlington-burns-every-mother-counts-2017/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/15/opinions/op-ed-christy-tu...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- albertgao 8y agoAs a Chinese, I should say, well, fucking CCP, just another bribe
- poster123 8y ago"Asian-Americans outlive whites by an average of nearly 8 years" according to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4567918/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4567918/ . Differences in life expectancy across countries are probably due to both genetic and social factors.
- muddyrivers 8y agoDiet might be another important factor. Asian tend to have balanced meals that include significant amounts of vegetables, fish, seafood, etc. I think the condition is improving. More and more people realize the importance of balanced meals. It shows in grocery stores. They stock more variety of vegetables and fish than before.
- timwaagh 8y agoa very short trip in vietnam made me realise i dont want to be in the netherlands for the rest of my life. there's better places out there.
- weliketocode 8y agoEven assuming that this data is flawless, I have a disdain for articles with such surface coverage of a topic. This article brings you so many questions about the methodology used that it is hard to even begin to consider implications...ie: What defines healthy life vs non-healthy life? Are current and expected levels of pollution, drug/alcohol dependences, and depression being considered? Is this including some sort of happiness/satisfaction measure? Does this include premature births which could the skew the US numbers lower if China is not including them?
- droidist2 8y agoThis map shows the life expectancy of different Chinese provinces in terms of other countries: https://www.economist.com/china/2015/10/31/noodles-of-longevity https://www.economist.com/china/2015/10/31/noodles-of-longev...
- EmilyHealth 8y agohttp://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oil-watch-happens-cholesterol-levels-stomach-issues/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oi...