COUNTRIES WHERE LIFE EXPECTANCY HAS NOT INCREASED (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder commented on my post which pointed out that the average global life expectancy has increased by 6 years in the last 25 years that: “You might check to see how much of that is concentrated in a very few countries. AIDS has certainly reduced life expectancy in some countries and now ebola in some already damaged by AIDS.”
The improvement in global life expectancy has indeed not included much of Africa. This article by Kate Kelland in Reuters (December 17) about the underlying study reported that HIV/AIDS is still the greatest cause of premature death in 20 out of 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and that in southern sub-Saharan Africa, deaths from HIV/AIDS “have erased some five years of life expectancy since 1990”.
The Wall Street Journal article by Gautam Naik that I cited in my post gave a life expectancy for Chad in 2013 of 21 years—up from 18 years in 1990.