“This one, it’s sort of across-the-board bad news,” said Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California who studies life expectancy around the world.A child born in the United States in 2019, for instance, could expect to live to 78.5, according to the World Health Organization, while a Japanese child born that year had a life expectancy of 84.5, Belgians lived to 81.4 and Swedes lived to 82.4.It also contrasted with rebounding life expectancy rates in some other nations as they brought the covid pandemic under greater control with vaccines and masking.Experts have speculated that fentanyl may be implicated in some of those fatalities because it is laced throughout the drug supply, causing some users to ingest it unknowingly.They also said the U.S. must expand the use of harm reduction techniques by widening distribution of naloxone, syringe services and fentanyl test strips."