Jakarta – Experts are concerned about human life expectancy globally which continues to show a downward trend, even though it is judged that humans will not live forever.
Quoted from detikHealth, Sunday (19/2/2023) the researchers said, this decrease in life expectancy was a major event that needed to be known more about its causes and how to deal with it.
One of them was put forward by ecologist Nate Bear, from data from the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization global life expectancy has decreased for two consecutive years.
This is the first time this has happened since the 1950s. Whereas previously, global life expectancy has continued to increase since the 1970s, without a single year of decline at that time.
The ecologist predicts that the data for 2022 will show a third decline in a row.
“When global life expectancy drops like this, it means you are in for some major event,” he wrote as quoted by Popular Mechanics.
“Economists like to talk about ‘big trends’ that determine the future. Maybe we can also call this a major event,” he continued.
If pulled back two years, a decrease in global life expectancy may have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, that does not mean that the pandemic is the only cause of the potential for a continued decline.
It is possible that there will be more diseases capable of reaching pandemic levels and there will still be potential lingering effects from the most recent pandemic.
Bear said this decline was a hint to the future showing that our regulatory agencies had yet to understand how to deal with the virus and increasing disease. Furthermore, he claims that the increase in deaths is directly related to the economy.
“When the rich get richer, the poor die faster. And when the government spends more to support the poor, they can live longer. The pandemic has shown us this,” Bear explained.
When drawn to the past, Bear points out, a decline in life expectancy has always meant that something historic was happening and often led to a fundamental restructuring of society.
“We don’t yet really know what destructive or creative forces are driving a pandemic. But we do know its effects will extend over time and, because it intersects with the climate and ecological crises, will raise the most difficult questions for civilization to answer: where are we going, ” he concluded.
This article has been published on detikInet, read in full here.
(wip/mso)
