Here’s an animated map showing each country’s average life expectancy at birth for every year since 1960, posted by Reddit user DataFreelancer to the Data Is Beautiful subreddit. [Boing Boing]

County-by-county life expectancy estimates released last month by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveal a startling gap between the longest-lived and shortest-lived areas of the country: the difference can be as much as 15 years.

The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest—Japan, Hong Kong, and France—while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care—Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.

And the situation isn’t improving either: “In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties.” When people refer to the U.S. as a Third World country, this sort of thing—the disparity, the decline—is usually one of the reasons why. Via Tobias Buckell.