The “paper of record” may not yet have broken the news, but it’s terrific news indeed: infant deaths across the world have fallen as life expectancy has increased, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Friday. Since the last decade of the 20th century, the number of children dying dropped from 12.4 million in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2009 — while the total number of kids increased significantly. As mortality plummeted, life expectancy rose — from an average of 64 years in 1990 to 68 years in 2009. “It may not sound like a lot,” ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross observes, “but this trend reflects millions of lives not lost prematurely.”
The WHO attributed both improved figures to increased spending on health care, immunization and education — “a combination of health intervention and social and economic improvement,” as the WHO’s Health Statistics Director Ties Boerma put it.
ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom adds, “There is little doubt that these numbers also reflect the penetration of antiretroviral drugs into areas where treatments were previously unavailable.”
