[sersi]

> In the Mankhurd slum in Mumbai, where the average life expectancy is 39

I wish articles didn't use life expectancy which is always misleading and confusing since it's severely affected by infant mortality. What would be more interesting would be 2 numbers, infant mortality and life expectancy at age 5.

[hamilyon2]

I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me that some official statistics I saw did not include dead in first year of life in life expectancy. Just as arbitrary as 5 years, I think.

[C1sc0cat]

So the death rate before 5 doesn't matter - I am sure it matters a LOT to the parents of those kids that die very young.

[sweeneyrod]

No, the point is that if you say that life expectancy is 39 that makes it sound like the average 10 year old will live to about 39. But the actual figure will be a lot higher because the overall figure is brought down by high infant mortality.

[foota]

It's not so useful if you're looking at the overall health of an area though, since infant mortality is a slightly different beast.

[saiya-jin]

well overall health of some area can't be that great if you have high infant mortality

[foota]

They're likely correlated. Might be interesting to look at the outliers (places with low child mortality and low life expectancy after 5 and places with high child mortality and high life expectancy after 5)

[sersi]

I would naively say (and this is why I made that point about having two different numbers) that life expectancy after in later years is also influenced by Violence, Wars and Addiction whereas infant mortality might be more influenced by health conditions, sanitisation, presence of germs and so on...

Regardless, in an article, saying that the life expectancy is 39 years old will make people think that people die at an extremely young age when often it's mostly due to infant/child mortality. Which is why separating it would make things clearer.