The Brothas Are Winning!! Life Expectancy For African-American Men At An All Time High

Congratulations, brothas! You are now officially living longer than all other Black men in the history of these United States.
Too bad you’re still not outliving Black women though. Or White folks. And the rest of us are dying just a little quicker.

Life expectancy of Americans fell for the first time in 15 years, as the nation’s oldest adults died from heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Based on data from 2008, the latest available, life expectancy in the U.S. fell 36.5 days from 2007 to 77.8 years, according to the report released today. Life expectancy is calculated by taking the death rates from the U.S. population in a specific year and figuring out the average number of years remaining for a person born in 2008.
Children born in 2008 lost a little over a month of expected life. The drop in expectancy was largely the effect of increased mortality among the oldest adults — those at least 85 — and a rise in age-related ailments such as Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure, kidney disease, flu and pneumonia, according to the report. Infant mortality declined, as did deaths among all age groups under 85.
“It’s hard for us to tell exactly what’s driving this,” said Arialdi Minino, a statistician at the health center and one of the report’s authors. The number of older people who died “has been going up consistently, and in this particular year, there was a little more of that than we usually see.”
The drop in life expectancy was mostly in the white population, which fell 73 days, while the rate among black women was unchanged at 76.8 years, and rose among black men to an all- time high of 70.2 years. The infant mortality rate fell 2.4 percent to 6.59 deaths for every 1,000 births in 2008.

And The Others couldn’t even let us have that small victory.

“Since the increase in mortality is affecting people who are above age 85, it may just be there are a lot fewer African- Americans who make it to that age,” said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal.