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By Jonathan Chevreau
Life expectancy around the world has risen by a whopping six years since 1990, according to a global survey released Friday.
As the CBC reports here, these longer lifetimes are occurring in both rich countries and poor ones, although for different reasons.
In the affluent west, it’s driven by falling death rates from the two big scourges of cancer and heart disease. In poorer countries, increased life expectancy is the result of progress in fighting tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhea. The tragic exception, however, is southern sub-Saharan Africa, where life expectancy has actually fallen five years because of rising deaths from HIV/AIDS.
The 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study was published in the Lancet medical journal.
For those born in 2012, life expectancy in Canada is now 80 for males and 84 for women, according to this report in May of 2014.
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