Bird’s Eye: Sometimes there is improvement in the world, and amidst the gore and war stories you don’t hear about it. Here are three unquestionable improvements in the world, one economic and two medical.
* New Consumer Class Powering Economic Growth Across South America The Washington Post
From Paraguay to Chile and Brazil to Peru, a growing middle class armed with cheap credit and new confidence in the future is contributing to the most vigorous economic expansion in decades. The growth in South America is still largely driven by Asia-bound exports of copper, iron ore, tin, meat and soybeans. But economists now talk of a new dynamic that reflects the stronger foundation of more-mature economies: increasingly affluent consumer societies.
* Cancer Survivors in U.S. Rise by 20% in 6 Years The New York Times
“There’s still a concept that cancer is a death sentence,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control. But, he said, “for many people with cancer there’s a need for them and their families and caregivers to recognize that this is a stage. They can live a long and healthy life.” About 65 percent of cancer survivors have lived at least five years since receiving their diagnosis, 40 percent have lived 10 years or more, and nearly 10 percent have lived 25 years or longer.
* Life Expectancy: And Now For the Good News Rob Lyons
Given the number of health panics we are constantly bombarded with, you’d think we all had one foot in the grave. One way or another, it seems, we’re going to eat, drink or smoke ourselves to an early grave. That is, if bird flu or some other horrible lurgy doesn’t get us first. But the reality is that we’re living longer, in spite of those things.
Last week, a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology provided chapter and verse on this good news story. In Western Europe, since 1970, life expectancy has typically increased by between six and eight years. Moreover, as the author David Leon notes, these trends are ‘overwhelmingly driven by changes in mortality in adult life, not in infancy or childhood’. Some of this is due to the gradual decline in smoking, but much of it is also due to improvements in the treatment of disease. That’s important because it means there some basis to hope that these trends will continue for some time, whereas the room for improvement at the start of life is more limited.
