There’s a price to pay for living longer: Diseases that never had time to grow within us in the past now reach “maturity.” In our favor, though, fewer people perish now due to the birth of twins. From “How We Used to Die,” a post at Priceonomics:

“They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, but how we die is far from certain. What kills us these days? By a wide margin, cancer and heart disease. This is very different from how we used to die in the United States.

In a study by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared causes of death from the past hundred years. They found that, in 1900, while heart disease and cancer were still major killers, they were less lethal than a host of other ailments. Pneumonia/influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections each claimed more lives per 100,000 people than did heart disease. On average, more people died by accident than by cancer.”