Chinese babies will live healthier, but not longer, lives than those born in United States, WHO says

China has overtaken the United States in healthy life expectancy at birth for the first time, according to the World Health Organisation.

Chinese newborns can look forward to 68.7 years of healthy life, compared with 68.5 years for American babies, the figures, which relate to 2016, showed.

Newborns in the US can still expect to live longer overall – 78.5 years compared to China’s 76.4 – but the last 10 years of American lives are not expected to be healthy.

“The lost years of good health that are a factor in calculating healthy life expectancy at birth are lower for China, Japan, Korea and some other high income Asian countries than for high income Western countries,” WHO spokeswoman Alison Clements-Hunt said.

The United States was one of only five countries, along with Somalia, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where healthy life expectancy at birth fell in 2016, according to a Reuters analysis of the WHO data, which was published without year-on-year comparisons earlier this month.

The best outlook was for Singaporean babies, who can count on 76.2 years of health on average, followed by those in Japan, Spain and Switzerland. The US came 40th in the global rankings, while China was 37th.