HEALTH

Study Finds - According to an analysis published in the journal The Lancet, life expectancy in the United States is expected to increase by just 2.1 years over the next three decades. Specifically, that means going from 78.3 years in 2022 to 80.4 years in 2050. These predictions come from a forecasting model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Researchers assessed the impacts of hundreds of health risks and diseases in individual states and the country. They compared these to more than 200 other countries, including high-income and some middle-income countries. The U.S. is expected to lose ground in life expectancy gains, dropping behind most other wealthy nations.

In 2022, the U.S. ranked 49^th in overall life expectancy among the 204 countries studied. That is expected to fall to 66^th in 2050, according to the IMHE analysis.

Life expectancy among women is predicted to improve less than that of men, reducing the gap between the sexes. According to the rankings, women are expected to drop from 51^st to 74^th and from 51^st to 65^th among men. The slight increase in life expectancy is expected to be attributable to a decline in a few leading causes of death, including diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Hartmann Report - As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,
— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

 NPR -  Can we eliminate the HIV epidemic? It's a question that dates back to the start of the epidemic in the 1980s. With 1.3 million new infections a year, the epidemic continues … and the world is not on track to meet the ambitious U.N. goal of ending HIV/AIDS by 2030.

But 2024 has fueled increasing optimism among leading infectious disease experts after the results of two groundbreaking clinical trial results for a drug called lenacapavir showed it to be capable of virtually eliminating new HIV infections through sex.

The emerging data surrounding lenacapavir is so astonishing that the drug's development has been heralded as the 2024 Breakthrough of the Year by the journal Science, which described it as representing "a pivotal step toward diminishing HIV/AIDS as a global health crisis." More