Image via CrunchBaseBy JANE GROSSSince her appointment as dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in 2008, Dr. Linda P. Fried, a geriatrician, has sought to make the dramatic aging of the world’s population, and its myriad ramifications, one of the pillars of education for the 1,100 graduate students there.
Since 1900, life expectancy for the average American has increased by three decades, creating a host of medical, financial and public policy challenges. Just as the school took on AIDS in the 1980s and emergency preparedness in the wake of 9/11, so it is now scrambling to prepare its students to turn this age wave from a public health emergency to an opportunity.
Rigorous exploration of the subject is now high on the school’s agenda. A study by Mailman researchers, released early this month, explored the causes of the lag in life expectancy in the United States, compared with more than a dozen other countries. To the researchers’ surprise, the likely suspects — obesity, smoking, traffic accidents and homicide — were not to blame for the disparity.
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