News that life expectancy among some American women has fallen earned startled headlines, as well it should. In this country, life expectancy is something that's supposed to go up. It took a big scourge, such as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, to depress it.

But a study published in the online journal PLoS finds that in about 1,000 U.S. counties, women's life expectancies are shorter than they were in the early 1980s. During this time, no deadly virus rampaged through the female popu ...

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