Health Curriculum: Unit 5--Main text: Grades 7-11

Fighting Disease:
Health At The End Of The Millennium
Another Wired Curriculum from The United Nations CyberSchoolBus

	Introduction
	How They Work
	How They Spread
	Poverty and Disease
	Prevention
	Immunization

Unit 5
Treatment and Prevention

MAIN TEXT
(GRADES 7-11)

Here's to a longer life

How long is life? It depends on who you are and where you are, but, on average, people born today get to live longer than those who came before - about 12 years more than those who lived in the 1960s.

It is, of course, impossible to predict how long a particular individual life will last. But it is at least useful to have a notion of how many years a person living under a certain set of circumstances might be expected to live.

Table 1
Life expectancy at birth (years)
	1960	1994
Industrialized countries	70	77
Developing countries	47	61
Least developed countries	40	51

This figure is called life expectancy and it is very much a function of social conditions, such as access to proper health care and shelter, which in turn depend on wealth. An average male citizen of Belgium, born in 1995, is expected to live until the age of 73. His counterpart in Ecuador will live to be 66 years old and in Mozambique the same man is expected to live only until the age of 44. Similarly, the life expectancy of a homeless person will be different from that of a well-fed and well-sheltered person. In London, for instance, a homeless person lives 25 years less than the average citizen.

In so far as life expectancy is an indicator of general health as well as of social conditions, it is directly linked to the control of infectious diseases which kill more people around the world than any other single cause. The math is quite simple. If the hundreds of millions of infants who die of preventable childhood diseases before they reach the age of 5 were to grow up healthily, it would boost the average life expectancy. Add to that a healthy able body who contributes to society and you also get a boost in social conditions.

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