Once again, life expectancy in Britain has reached a new high. Based on mortality rates in 2003-5, the average 65-year-old male can expect to live a further 16.6 years, according to the Office for National Statistics, while the average 65-year-old woman can expect to hang on all the way to 84.4. And, since mortality rates will probably keep improving, as they have done consistently for decades, it is likely that both groups will end up living even longer.
Not everyone in Britain is average, however. Scots have by far the worst mortality rate in the land, with men in central Glasgow dying at an average age of 69.9 - equivalent to the life expectancy in Algeria, and not much better than the world average of 66. Women in Kensington and Chelsea, on the other hand, can expect to live to 86.2 - suggesting what most of us might already have guessed, that being rich is good for you.
The same principle holds wherever you go. A world map of life expectancy looks much like a world map of income, with all the worst areas clustered in sub-Saharan Africa. Aids has vastly magnified the effect, too, so that, horrifyingly, the average woman in Zimbabwe, where people used to live to an average age of 61, now dies at 34, younger than anywhere else in the world, and roughly equivalent to life expectancy in the Stone Age.
Bronze Age man appears to have had the worst mortality rate of all, dying on average at 18, and ancient Rome fared little better with 28. These figures mask the true picture, however, as there were always a few elderly Romans (Pliny springs to mind), but infant mortality rates were so high that few babies survived into their teens. For this reason, even at the end of the Victorian era, life expectancy in western Europe was still just 37.
Today, British children's chances of reaching 65 are the best they have ever been. By adjusting today's mortality rates for likely future improvements, the ONS gives a baby boy born in Britain in 2004 a 90% chance of living to the age of 65, while a baby girl's chances of reaching old age are a magnificent 94%. Bear that in mind next time you read about the perils of non-organic baby food.
