• Question: why are we starting to live longer now

    Asked by Lewis -T- to Hannah, Jenny, Steven on 17 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 17 Nov 2016:

      Hi
      We live longer nowadays because we have better drugs for when we get sick and vaccines to prevent us getting ill. For example, in the 1950s there were up to 7760 cases of paralytic polio in the UK and 750 deaths, each year, but then a vaccine was discovered and this has now got rid of the disease from Europe. We also have better ways of detecting disease. A lot of cancers are detected more and at earlier stages now when we have a better chance of treating them. We have a better understanding of what causes disease now too and we know that smoking and obesity can lead to several diseases.
      Jenny

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 18 Nov 2016:

      Hi Lewis,

      An excellent question!

      Basically as medicine is better able to diagnose and treat illnesses, people no longer die from these illnesses, so they go on to live longer. The problem with this is that they then get new illnesses that need to be investigated!

      For example, millions of people used to die from things like meningitis, tuberculosis and pneumonia… Now thanks to antibiotics deaths from these illnesses is much rarer… However now things like cancer and dementia are much more common than they used to be! Back in the middle ages, the average life expectancy was around 30 years old. Now it’s around 80!

      So bascially it’s down to modern medicine, and things should (hopefully) continue to improve!

      Steve

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