Layered on this scandalous denial of a healthy life is the inexorably growing burden of ageing and of so-called lifestyle disease, where obesity is taking the place of smoking.
An anti-ageing therapy could have a dramatic impact on public health by reducing the burden of age-related health problems, such as dementia, stroke and heart disease, and prolonging the quality of life for an increasingly aged population.
The government is aiming to place the burden of age verification on commercial pornography providers – those profiting from material deemed as 18 or R18 by the British Board of Film Classification.
That has encouraged governments in a number of rich countries to believe that, with the right policies, they too could boost fertility to closer to replacement levels and help moderate the social burden of ageing.
Rid of the senescent cells, the Mayo Clinic researchers reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, the mice's tissues showed a major improvement in the usual burden of age-related disorders.
Nonetheless, most people today don't want to take the trouble themselves, and while some restaurants will bear the burden of aging wines, they usually charge forbidding prices for their efforts.
By 2050 it will have three dependents for every four adults, so will shoulder a large burden of ageing, which even sustained increases in fertility would fail to reverse for decades.
That is not insignificant, but it is far less than some of the breathless commentary about the "burden" of ageing implies.Taken together, the net effect of high saving by educated older workers and less-generous pensions is likely to be an unexpected degree of thrift in the rich world, at least for the next few years.
Rich countries with lots of well-educated older people will find the burden of ageing easier to bear than places like China, where half of all 50-to-64-year-olds did not complete primary-school education.At the other end of the social scale, however, things look grim.
