I am surprised that the article did not really mention why American life expectancy is relatively low. The answer to this question is well-known and is a related to a unique negative bias in the American statistics rather than older Americans dying earlier.
Put simply, Americans have an anomalously high rate of dying when they are young due to homicide and accidents, particularly vehicular. These are large statistical outliers compared to the rest of the industrialized world. This negatively alters the average life expectancy but does not say much about the life expectancy in the individual case.
If you control for just homicide and vehicular accidents, Americans have among the highest life expectancy in the world despite issues like obesity, and many Americans have negligible risk of those causes of premature death. In terms of deaths due to medical issues (cancer, heart disease, etc), Americans have the highest life expectancy in the world, which offsets the homicide and accident death rates among the young.
There used to be a saying by the people that study life expectancy statistics that the only people on Earth that live longer than Japanese women are Japanese women living in the US. Which is true and captured an essential point about the mixture of factors in life expectancy statistics.
Hmm? It did describe the major reason, and it wasn't younger people killing themselves in accidents or infant mortality:
Right away, they found our weak spot. "U.S. women have
relatively high mortality rates at the younger older ages,"
they said, which means when women hit their 55th birthdays,
for the next almost 20 years, roughly 55 to 75, they will
die more often than women in comparable countries. Americans
get more lung disease, more heart disease, more diabetes. If
Americans reach 75, they get competitive again, but that
early old age is where we lose ground. American men showed
pretty much the same weakness at roughly the same times.
They just haven't been able to explain why this discrepancy at this age exists.
Did you not see that part, or did you have some disagreement with it? I have not read the full report that it was based on yet, so I can't comment in detail: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62373/
> Put simply, Americans have an anomalously high rate of dying when they are young due to homicide and accidents, particularly vehicular.
Except that, as noted in the NIH study cited in the report [1], the US has, over the past several decades, been progressively falling behind other OECD countries in life expectancy at age 50 in both genders, because of a higher mortality rate at the younger end of the 50+ scale. So, no, its just not about Americans getting killed (whether in accidents and homicides or any other way) at a young age.
As I understand it, life expectancy is also skewed by misreporting of infant deaths in other countries, which biases infant mortality stats against countries that reliably report them.
"Misreporting" is a strong term. While I'm sure a few countries (e.g. the Communist Paradise of Cuba) do misreport their statistics, many other countries get different answers via reasonable disagreement on definitions.
Consider an 5 month old fetus who completely passed through the vagina, takes one breath and dies. Is that infant mortality or miscarriage? Now make it 6 months old, but he didn't take any breaths. Or 7 months, the head (but not body) passed through the vagina, then he dies. Or 7 months, body but not head passed through vagina. If you want to draw distinctions between miscarriage and infant mortality you need to draw a more or less arbitrary line. Not every nation draws the line in the same place and the statistics are therefore incomparable.
You are right about the effect this has on the statistics. I'm just suggesting that there are far less nefarious reasons than misreporting stats.
Calling it misreporting is harsh, but the implication of not counting some babies is that they weren't really people. I think that's worth thinking about.
Also, calling a fully-born human being a fetus is both inaccurate and even more harsh than this use of the word "misreporting".
For the sake of furthering on-topic discussion, let's all agree that infant mortality is a different problem than longevity and therefore a better measure than "life expectancy from birth" would be "life expectancy from age 1" or something along those lines.
As the article (and even more, the NIH study cited in the article) shows, statistics show that the US does poorly against other developed countries if you look at life expectancy at age 50, which is obviously not skewed by differences in reporting infant mortality.
Are you sure about that? The issue isn't that people don't care if infants die, but that infant fatalities occurring quickly after birth can be declared "stillbirths", and that there aren't standards for that distinction.
Put simply, Americans have an anomalously high rate of dying when they are young due to homicide and accidents, particularly vehicular. These are large statistical outliers compared to the rest of the industrialized world. This negatively alters the average life expectancy but does not say much about the life expectancy in the individual case.
If you control for just homicide and vehicular accidents, Americans have among the highest life expectancy in the world despite issues like obesity, and many Americans have negligible risk of those causes of premature death. In terms of deaths due to medical issues (cancer, heart disease, etc), Americans have the highest life expectancy in the world, which offsets the homicide and accident death rates among the young.
There used to be a saying by the people that study life expectancy statistics that the only people on Earth that live longer than Japanese women are Japanese women living in the US. Which is true and captured an essential point about the mixture of factors in life expectancy statistics.