The life expectancy in Taiwan last year was 80.77 years — up from 80.23 a year earlier — with cancer the top cause of death for the 43rd consecutive year, the Ministry of the Interior said in a statement yesterday.
Cancer deaths totaled 54,032 last year, or 26.83 percent of all deaths, the ministry said, citing Ministry of Health and Welfare data.
Had it not been for malignant tumors, life expectancy — the average number of years a newborn is expected to live — would have been 84.36 years, or 3.59 years longer, the statement said.
Graphic courtesy of the Ministry of the Interior
Cancer’s effect on life expectancy ebbed last year compared with 2014, when malignant tumors reduced the figure by 4.04 years, suggesting a reduction in the nation’s cancer prevalence, it said.
The third-biggest cause of death in Taiwan last year was pneumonia, whose negative impact on health increased in terms of the number of deaths and life expectancy reduction, it said.
The loss of lifespan stemming from pneumonia was 1.05 years last year, up from 0.94 years in 2023, it said.
The unexplained rise in pneumonia deaths is of concern to the government, it said.
In other news, the number of people living alone last year increased to 3.574 million, or 37.67 percent of those with household registration, interior ministry data showed.
The nation’s population was 23.6 million in 2019, but had fallen to 23.4 million last year, the interior ministry said.
However, the number of households has grown, largely driven by a decline in child-rearing families, it said.
Last year, 5.49 million households — or 59 percent of registered households — consisted of people who lived alone or couples without children, it said.
The number of single-person households or couples without children has steadily increased over the past decade, it added.
Meanwhile, the number of multi-generational households decreased last year, with trigenerational families of five or more members falling to 985,000, or less than 10.3 percent, the interior ministry said.
Government records from Keelung showed that 41.61 percent of the city’s registered households last year had a single member, the highest rate among the nation’s 22 local administrations, it said.
Taitung and Taipei were not far behind, with both reporting that single-person households accounted for more than 40 percent of the total, it said.
Population density decreased in Taiwan last year in a sign of the nation’s demographic decline, it said.
Population density fell from a height of 652 people per square kilometer in 2019 to 644 people per square kilometer last year, corresponding with the nation’s shrinking population, the interior ministry said.
Last year, Taipei was the most densely populated local administration in the nation, with 8,988 people per square kilometer, followed by 4,371 people per square kilometer in Hsinchu City and 4,343 people per square kilometer in Chiayi City, it said.
Last year’s least densely populated administrative regions were Nantou County with 114 people per square kilometer, Hualien County with 67 people per square kilometer and Taitung County with 59 people per square kilometer, it said.
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