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The next time you start to mutter under your breath about how life in the big city is taking years off your life, think about this: New Yorkers are living a lot longer than they did a decade ago and are living longer than Americans as a whole. Life expectancy in New York City stands at an estimated 77.6 years over all, the longest in history; 80.2 years for women; and 74.5 years for men, the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported yesterday. As for your fears of West Nile, anthrax, SARS, reckless cabbies and all the other perils of life in the metropolis, consider that for the first time in 60 years, life expectancy for New Yorkers is above the national average, by about seven months. The figures come from the department's annual summary of vital statistics, a trivia lover's dream that includes 66 pages of data, from the big picture to the minutia, on the lives and deaths of New Yorkers. The report is available on the department's Web site at http://www.nyc .gov/html/doh/pdf/vs/2001sum.pdf. Life spans in the city are much longer than they were a decade ago, by 3.2 years for women and a striking 6.8 years for men, thanks mostly to the drop in homicides and AIDS deaths. Partly for those same reasons, black New Yorkers gained more ground than others, but they continue to live about five years less than whites and seven years less than Hispanics. The disparity is clearest among the very old; non-Hispanic whites account for 35 percent of the city's population, but they are 69 percent of the people 85 or older. (Technically, the life expectancy figures are predictions for babies born in 2000. But in fact, they are based on the ages at which people died in 1999 through 2001, not counting those killed in the World Trade Center attack. If the trade center dead were included, the average would be one-tenth of a year lower.) In 2001, 124,023 new New Yorkers entered the world, or 15.5 per 1,000 of population, the lowest rate since 1981. Still, they more than compensated for the lowest death rate in the city's history, 7.5 per thousand, or 60,218 people who drew their last within the five boroughs in 2001. (If the trade center victims were included in that calculation, it would still be the fourth-lowest the city had ever recorded.) Fewer New Yorkers die each year now than did a century ago, when the city's population was less than half as big. Infant mortality in 2001 was the lowest in history, 6.1 per 1,000, continuing a trend that has been going on for decades. Predictably, heart disease and cancer were the runaway leaders among causes of death in 2001, as they are for all Americans, with a combined 63 percent of the total. More surprising is that AIDS and H.I.V.-related ailments remained in third place in the city. The disease caused 2 percent of all deaths in 2001, or 1,166 lives ended, mostly Hispanics and blacks, despite the drug cocktails that have granted long life to so many infected people. AIDS and H.I.V.-related ailments are still the leading cause of death among New Yorkers ages 35 to 44. Smoking, not technically considered a cause of death, was the underlying cause of 7 percent of all deaths, the department said. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
