MORTALITY

in demographic usage, the frequency of death in a population. In general, the risk of death at any given age is less for females than for males, except during the childbearing years (in economically developed societies females have a lower mortality even during those years). The risk of death for both sexes is high immediately after birth, diminishing during childhood and reaching a minimum at 10 to 12 years of age. The risk then rises again, until at late ages it surpasses that of the first year of life. The expectation of life at birth is the most efficient index of the general level of mortality of a population. In ancient Greece and Rome the average life expectancy was about 28 years; in the developed countries of the world it was about 74 years at the beginning of the 1990s.