All the News That’s Fit: Longer lives, spray-cheese eating and The Big Game

For The Union-Tribune

Living long depends on where’s your living

Even with modern medicine, vaccines and artificial intelligence helping to diagnose diseases early, the risk of dying before age 70 — called probability of premature death or PPD — still varies widely around the world.

In 2019, 12 percent of people in the world’s healthiest countries died before age 70. In sub-Saharan Africa, that number was 52 percent; in India, 37 percent; in the United States, 22 percent; and in Western Europe and Canada, 15 percent, according to Duke University research published in JAMA Health Forum.

“We expected disparities,” said the study’s lead author Omar Karlsson, a scholar with the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at the Duke Global Health Institute. “What was surprising was just how extremely uneven mortality decline has been across the world.”

Japan remains the place to live if you want to live a long time. Japan’s PPD stood at 12 percent, down dramatically from 57 percent in 1900 (based on historical demographic data). The U.S. is a different story. It’s losing ground.

Despite having the highest health care spending in the world, the U.S. is doing worse than expected when it comes to preventing early deaths. In 1970, the U.S. lagged 29 years behind the global frontier. By 2019, that gap had grown to 38 years.

The researchers cited deep inequalities in the U.S. health care system, high costs and wasteful medical spendin...