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Show I..F. Says 1 Life Expectancy at Ail-Time High Expectancy Estimated Average Life Expectancy in years At Birth, United States. 1900-59 1900 1920 - 1940 1959 Soore: Haalth Information foundation K The average American baby born in 1959 had a life expectancy ex-pectancy at that time of 69.7 years-the highest ever recorded for the total population of infants, Health Information Foun- dation reports. By contrast, as the chart illustrates, il-lustrates, a baby born in 1900 could expect to live only 47.3 years. Although both males and females fe-males have benefited from increasing in-creasing life expectancy in this century, the Foundation adds, greater gains have been made by females. Thus, while life expectancy ex-pectancy for males rose from 46.3 years in 1900 to 66.4 in 1958 (a gain of 20.1 years), the comparable rise for females was from 48.3 to 72.7 (a gain of 24.4 years). The Foundation singles out a number of social consequences arising from the trend toward longer life, notably a record growth in the number of aged persons in this country, an increase in-crease in the working lifetime of the average person, a de cline in the number of orphans, and a general postponing of widowhood to the later years. According to George Bugbee, Foundation President, the increase in-crease in life expectancy is "one of the most fundamental changes chang-es to affect our country in this century." The improvement has been largely due to a "dynamic growth" in medical knowledge, particularly in the last two decades. To illustrate the effect ef-fect of medical progress on improved im-proved life expectancy, Mr. Bugbee refers to "the infective and parasitic diseases, which once decimated those at the younger ages, but which have now been largely controlled. This class of diseases, which caused about 18 per cent of the deaths in 1900, today causes just over 1 per cent." |