The long-term rise in British life expectancy has slowed amid worries about future medical setbacks including growing antibiotic resistance, an official report said yesterday.
It said there is less optimism about future lifespans because of the re-appearance of diseases once thought to have been conquered, and the risk that antibiotic drugs will become less effective.
The estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said a boy born last year will live for 79.2 years and a girl for 82.9 years.
By 2066, it said, a newborn girl is likely to live for 88.9 years and a boy for 86.4.
Long-term rise in life expectancy in Britain has slowed amid concerns about growing antibiotic resistance
But the report warned that worries about the effects of disease have clouded some of the prospects for future generations.
Sophie Sanders, of the ONS, said: ‘Improvement in life expectancy in the 2016-based projections are slightly lower than those in the 2014-based projections.
‘This has been driven by higher mortality rates in 2015 and 2016 than were projected in 2014 and lower rates of mortality improvement at older ages over the first 25 years of the projections.’
One reason for higher mortality rates among older people was the flu epidemic, which caused higher-than-usual winter deaths in the early months of 2015.
However, the ONS report also pointed to worries about future medical care, which have pulled back estimates of life expectancy, which take into account possible future improvements in science and health.
It said life expectancy calculations which account for future advances – known as ‘cohort’ life expectancy – remain higher than those which simply look at the lifespans of people living in the same area at the same time, which are known as ‘period’ estimates.
But the ONS report noted: ‘Due to less optimistic views on the influences of factors such as improvements in medical science, re-emergence of existing diseases and increases in anti-microbial resistance, the difference between period and cohort figures has reduced for both males and females in recent projections.’
The closing gap has meant that the higher ‘cohort’ estimates have slipped back.
The difference has mean that in 2012 the ‘cohort’ lifespan for a woman born in 2066 was 10.4 years longer than the ‘period’ version, but by last year falling confidence about medical science meant the gap between the two estimates had slipped back to 9.2 years.
For a man, the gap fell from 10.8 years in 2012 calculations to 9.7 years last year.
The flu epidemic caused more winter deaths than usual in 2015 and illnesses such as tuberculosis have also made a comeback
There has been growing concern in recent years at the overuse of antibiotics and the development of strains of disease that are resistant.
Diseases that were killers in Victorian times have also returned, with tuberculosis and rickets among those once thought to have been eradicated which are increasingly common, especially among poorer immigrant populations.
Last year there were 19,000 cases of scarlet fever, the highest level in 50 years.
Signs of a slowdown in increasing life expectancy have led to a series of other theories on the reasons why.
Earlier this year a senior health academic, Sir Michael Marmot, said ‘austerity is an obvious candidate.’
Lifestyles have also been suggested as a key reason. Over recent decades men have benefitted from the decline of dangerous and unhealthy heavy industrial jobs, and both men and women have gained from falls in levels of smoking and drinking.
Some researchers think improvements due to healthier lifestyles and working lives may have levelled off, and that changes in women’s lives, such as the increasing liklihood of a woman spending a lifetime in employment, may also be taking effect.