Dec 29, 2017 3 min read

It’s not widely remembered today, but successive waves of the so-called Asian flu between 1957 and 1962 killed thousands of Americans and led to a slight drop in life expectancy.

A downgrade in life expectancy, no matter how minuscule, is pretty remarkable considering the advances that have been made in health care, and the increased awareness we now have of how bad lifestyle choices can kill us, whether it’s smoking or drinking or snarfing down too much fatty food. Where Americans might have once routinely died at age 65, or been infirm by that point, they now frequently enjoy relatively good health into their 80s or even beyond.

The promise of ever-expanding lifespans has undoubtedly lulled many of us into complacency, and that made the headlines last week that life expectancy was down for the second straight year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all the more jarring. It marked the first time since the days of the Asian flu that life expectancy was notched down two years in a row – the AIDS crisis brought it down for one year, in 1993 – and the culprit remains the opioid epidemic.

According to the CDC, a child born in America in 2016 can expect to live 78.6 years, a one-month decrease from the year before, and a two-month decrease from 2014. While death rates from commonplace killers like cancer and heart disease ticked down slightly, death rates for those younger than 65 went up, with drug overdoses being the leading factor. All told, there were 63,600 overdose deaths in 2016, with 42,000 of those fatalities the result of opioids. The number of overdose deaths increased by 21 percent from 2015, setting a record.

Peter Muenning, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University, told USA Today, “The rest of the world is improving. The rest of the world is seeing large declines in mortality and large improvements in life expectancy. That’s true in rich countries and middle-income countries and generally true even in lower-income countries.”

And yet America is falling behind, and it’s not out of the question that when the numbers are tallied for 2017 at the end of next year, the bleak trend will continue. “What we’re seeing in our surveillance system for 2017 so far doesn’t look good, doesn’t look any better than 2016,” according to Bob Anderson of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. He told the Huffington Post, “Assuming that things kind of stay the way they are with other causes of death, and the drug overdose mortality goes up, I think we’re in for more of the same and maybe a third year in a row of declining life expectancy, which we haven’t seen for 100 years, since the Spanish flu in 1916, 1917 and 1918.”

We’ve noted before that there’s no silver-bullet solution to the opioid epidemic, and people both inside and outside government are doing yeoman’s work to try to tame it. But the new statistics from the CDC underscore the severity of the problem and the fact that, even as we welcome a new year and a moment of renewal, it isn’t going away. Those may be grim tidings, but that is the reality we face.