Intermediate 
A girl born today in the UK can expect to live nearly to the age of 82 on average and her brother will live to 78. They would have a longer life in Andorra (85 and 79 respectively) but will live a little longer than in the US (81 and 76). If they lived in the Central African Republic, they would die in middle age (49 and 44). However, almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of countries such as Lesotho, which have experienced HIV and violence, lifespans are lengthening. And the best news is that small children are much less likely to die than they were forty years ago. There has been a drop in deaths in under-fives of nearly 60%, from 16.4 million in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2010.
This last statistic provides justification for the enormous project that the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle has led over the past five years, involving nearly 500 researchers, to assess the global effects of disease. Knowing how many children die and from what cause allows the world to focus its efforts and resources on keeping them alive. There are many lessons to be learnt from the enormous database they have put together, which will help global organizations and individual governments to better care for us all.
The project was a big task and is not without controversy. IHME has been very radical in some of its methods. Where they did not have death registries or medical records, for instance, they have taken evidence from verbal autopsies  deciding the cause of death by an interview with the family. The most surprising result has been the malaria figure. IHME said 1.2 million die of the disease every year  twice as many as previously thought. The big increase is in adult deaths. It is commonly believed that malaria kills mostly children under five.
The way I was taught as a doctor and everybody else is taught is that, in malarial areas, you become semi-immune as an adult, said Dr Christopher Murray, IHME Director. We originally went with that opinion but there has been a change as we have become more empirical, following the data. African doctors write on hospital records that adults are dying of malaria a lot. But, he adds, their fever could be something else. The findings have led to further studies.