How death has changed over the last 110 years

[andrewducker]

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Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I love Wonkblog.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

this somehow seems to suggest that the death rate has dropped 45% or so. Last time I checked it's still 100%.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

That is somewhat puzzling...

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

Deaths per 100,000 during the year on the x axis. If (as) population expands, death rate drops faster than average age of death increases.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

The two obvious changes are the emergence of suicides (no longer illegal, and the religious angle no longer has the edge it used to) and the growth in cancer (natural consequence of increased longevity).

[autopope.livejournal.com]

No, the obvious change is the discovery of antibiotics.

Most of the pathogen-caused deaths go away. People live longer. What's left is diseases of age -- cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's.

If we don't get new antibiotics soon, the graph in 50-100 years time will resemble the graph from 1900: lots of elderly folks dying of antibiotic-resistance bacterial infections, XDR-TB ripping its way through the poor, and so on.

However, I find the 50% decline in accidental deaths heartening.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming this is for the US only? Not that the Washington Post bothers stating that, of course...

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

This does have the bizarre implication that there are only 600 deaths per 100,000 people in the US per year, whereas you'd expect it to be about 1200 (assuming life expectancy of 80+ years). Have they just left off 600 deaths from general "old age"? Or do half of all US deaths happen abroad? Or is immigration somehow accounting for this?

[andrewducker]

If there used to be huge wodges of children being born and then dying nigh-instantly from Pneumonia/Tuberculosis, Gatrointestinal problems then that would account for it.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

Also, population in 1930 was 123m, now it's more than twice that, but death rate is per 100,000 in the USA now, not when the people who died this year were born (I assume)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Prior to the 1920s, infant mortality was up to 50% by age 5. If you made it to 5, you had a very good chance of making it to 55, but bad sanitation plus no antibiotics and few vaccines made early childhood a very dangerous time.

Note: for a human society to maintain a stable population (with zero population growth) you need an average of 2.05-2.1 children per female -- today, with deaths between birth and age 5 running at a tiny fraction of a single percentage point. If 50% of your children die in infancy, you need 4.1-4.2 children per adult female. If there's a 10% chance of dying in childbirth (as was normal before 1860 and the germ theory of disease and doctors washing their hands) then to maintain a static population women need to bear an average of around 5 children, and stand a 50% chance of dying in the process. Life, for women, in a world without antibiotics or antisepsis was grim beyond belief; it's interesting to note the correlation between antisepsis, declining childbed death rates, and the emancipation movement, which prefigured by a century the correlation between legal and effective abortion and contraception and second-wave feminism.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, I figured it was infant mortality, but I wasn't sure!

Oh, and I hadn't considered the effect on mother mortality, that's fascinating (in a grim way).

[del-c.livejournal.com]

The principal cause of low death rate in a year, divided by population in that same year, is population growth. Most people dying today are of a reasonable age, i.e. they were born many decades ago. But there were far fewer people alive many decades ago than there are now, so the death rate in a growing population looks strangely low. If you naively divide the rate by the population it looks like people are living far beyond a century, but that only applies for a steady state population.

Similarly, the death rate in a static or falling population looks high after a previous period of growth, even if nothing particularly bad is happening. I expect the funeral business to expand as a relative sector of the economy; as the millions of people who were born in the twentieth century gradually approach old age, their deaths will grow exponentially the way their births did.

[andrewducker]

Yup, that makes sense to me.