A report released by World Health Organisation shows that the average life expectancy globally has increased, with men and women living for at least 68 and 73 years, respectively.
The officials said that this increase in life expectancy was due to medical advances for treating infectious diseases.
"There are major gains in life expectancy in recent decades and they continue," said Ties Boerma, WHO chief of statistics and information systems, reports FOX News. "We're seeing a health transition from success in infectious diseases to more people dying, including at younger ages, from non-communicable diseases."
According to the report, Japan had the highest life expectancy for women at 87-years-old. Men lived longer in Iceland with at least 81.2 years of age. Other top 10 countries with the increased life expectancy for both the sexes were Switzerland, Singapore, Italy and Luxembourg.
The WHO report found that the lowest life expectancy was in sub-Saharan Africa with less than 55 years to live for both male and female.
Overall, the report shows that the human life expectancy increased over the years and does not appear to slow down.
"If human life expectancy was capped at population level at around 90 years of life we would expect to see a slowdown as we approach those limits. We're not seeing that," said Colin Mathers, co-ordinator of WHO's statistics on mortality.
The report also explained the reasons of 'years of life lost' which is a number that factors in the effects of certain diseases on the death rates in younger people. Scientists said that diarrhea and respiratory infections, which are the leading causes of early death, fell by 40 and 30 percent respectively from 2000 to 2012. During this time, years of life lost caused by road injuries increased by 14 percent. The researchers said that as developing countries grew, the number of people driving also increased.
"An important reason why global life expectancy has improved so much is that fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday," WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a press release. "But there is still a major rich-poor divide: people in high-income countries continue to have a much better chance of living longer than people in low-income countries."
