News release: “While people in Japan, Canada, and other nations are enjoying significant gains in life expectancy every year, most counties within the United States are falling behind, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. IHME researchers, in collaboration with researchers at Imperial College London, found that between 2000 and 2007, more than 80% of counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, known as the international frontier. The new study, Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context, was published June 15, 2011 in BioMed Central’s open-access journal Population Health Metrics. In conjunction with the study, IHME is releasing a complete time series for life expectancy from 1987 to 2007 for all counties, the most up-to-date analysis available.”