Factors Influencing Death Rates

Geography: Cambridge International GCSE (2027 Exams), topic 6.2.2

Factors Influencing Death Rate

There are lots of factors that influence the death rate of a country. These can be split up into education and health-related factors.

The best-educated people generally live in the most developed nations and they have the highest life expectancies.
E.g. UK life expectancy is 81 years whereas Nigeria’s life expectancy is 53 years.
The UK has a society which educates women whereas Nigeria does not.
The key to developing a country is educating girls as this encourages fewer babies.
Fewer children improves the standard of living for all as there is more food for all.

After World War 2, vaccines and cures for tropical diseases decreased death rates significantly around the world.
Initially, richer nations benefited first so their life expectancy increased significantly but the developing world has now caught up except in a few pockets of the world.
E.g. Sub-saharan Africa, which still has life expectancies 20 years below Western Europe.
In LICs people are more likely to die from poverty and lack of effective treatments for water-borne illness such as cholera and typhoid.

AIDS and HIV have been a large part of the disparity in life expectancies globally.
HIV can be passed on to babies through their mothers or through sex.
Countries with uneducated people or large Muslim or Catholic populations do not use condoms as much to stop transmission of the disease.
Because it is a stigmatized topic, it is not often spoken about.
South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana are worst hit with 15% of people of childbearing age (15-49 years) having HIV or AIDs.

The loss of working age people means a weakened labour force and underproduction, causing starvation through food insecurity.
Orphaned children are likely to be in a poverty trap as they have no one to provide for them.
Countries are less able to develop education, infrastructure or business as they are paying for medicines, so development is not able to happen at a sensible rate or at all.

HICs have a range of other health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and cholesterol issues.
This is because of poor diet (and genetics in some instances), and a non-active lifestyle.
Mental health issues due to a stressful lifestyle also occur in HICs.
Future large-scale issues might be:
Antibiotic resistance of superbugs.
New infectious diseases spreading more quickly to pandemic proportions because of migration and travel patterns using planes (e.g.SARS/H1N1).