The drug overdose rate rose 9.6 percent compared to 2016, while suicides climbed 3.7 percent, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics.

As a result, the average life span in America dropped to “78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016,” said the report.

The data comes as the United States grapples with a vast opioid epidemic, fueled by addiction to prescription painkillers as well as street drugs like heroin and synthetic opioids including fentanyl.

“The latest CDC data show that the US life expectancy has declined over the past few years. Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide,” said CDC director Robert Redfield.

“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

A ‘very concerning’ trend

Overdoses were a major factor when US life expectancy dropped slightly in 2015 for the first time in decades.

Another downtick was reported by the CDC in 2016, though those data were later revised to show a flat year, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the NCHS.

Overall, the statistics show a “downward trend in life expectancy since 2014,” a time period in which Americans have lost 0.3 years of life, he told AFP, describing the trend as “very concerning.”

Anderson said declines like this haven’t been seen since the great flu pandemic of 1918 and World War I — though those losses were steeper.

The peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s also saw a nationwide drop in life expectancy.

“We’re a developed country, we have a lot of resources, we should have increasing life expectancy, not decreasing life expectancy,” he added.

Canadians live on average three years longer than Americans. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, at almost 84.

‘Hard to digest’

Drug overdose deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl — which killed the musicians Prince and Tom Petty — and tramadol increased by 45 percent between 2016 and 2017.

The rate of heroin deaths was seven times higher than in 1999.

CDC figures showed that a total of 70,237 people died of overdoses in 2017.

Most of these deaths were unintentional in nature.

The rise — although dramatic at nearly 10 percent year-on-year — was about half the spike seen a year earlier.

In 2016, 21.6 percent more people died from overdoses compared to 2015.

Separately released preliminary government data for the first part of 2018 have also appeared to show a leveling off in overdose deaths.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at a health conference in October, when that data came out, that the “seemingly relentless trend of rising overdose deaths seems to be finally bending in the right direction.”

But experts urged caution in interpreting the results to mean the opioid epidemic has peaked, or is anywhere near an end.

“It is encouraging to see the trajectory of this start to decrease, without a doubt,” said Harshal Kirane, director of addiction services at Staten Island University Hospital in New York, who was not involved in the data collection.

“What would be a signal of some real change would be when the total number of overdose deaths year to year is actually decreasing,” he told AFP.

“Seventy-thousand deaths is hard to digest in any way as a positive outcome.”

“We could face an environmental catastrophe,” Beatriz Alva, a manager with state oil firm Petroperu, told channel N television.

Alva gave the volume of spilled crude as “more or less 8,000 barrels.”

Residents in a remote community of Morona district, in the northeastern Loreto region, “cut the pipeline” on Tuesday night and prevented workers from repairing it, Alva said.

Residents of the district are overwhelmingly indigenous people.

Villagers had threatened last week to cut the pipeline, which moves crude from Amazonian wells to coastal refineries, in a protest against alleged irregularities in local elections held in October.

Peru’s Amazon region has seen repeated oil spills in recent years, some the results of a lack of maintenance. Others were caused by protest attacks.

The country produced 127,000 barrels of oil per day in 2017, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

The adaptation plan — a revision of an earlier plan drawn up in 2015 — was compiled ahead of the December effectuation of the Climate Change Adaptation Law, which is aimed at creating a society that can keep up with the progression of global warming.

Global warming can be countered through mitigation, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and adaptation, by reducing the impact of global warming.

The new plan will make clear which measures will be carried out by which ministry or agency.

For developing countries that are susceptible to the effects of global warming, the government will also set up a framework to utilize Japan’s technological strength and scientific knowledge to forecast the impact in the Asia-Pacific region and support their efforts toward adaptation.

Accordingly, the government will set up a panel to promote adaptation with the participation of relevant ministries and agencies. The panel, to be headed by the environment minister, is scheduled to hold its first meeting on Dec. 3.

Govts already taking action

Ahead of the enforcement of the Climate Change Adaptation Law, the central government and local authorities are already taking steps to protect farm produce from such climate change-related phenomena as record-breaking torrential rain and extreme heat.

The city of Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture, was hit by landslides amid heavy rain in western Japan in July. “In recent years, droughts and heavy rain have intensified tremendously,” said Keiro Wada, chief of the city government’s agricultural and forestry section.

Shinji Ninomiya, a 38-year-old tangerine farmer in the city, saw his about 100-square-meter field of tangerine trees swept away by a landslide. Landslides have occurred three or four times in the last decade and it takes three years to produce the fruit from seedlings, Ninomiya said.

“We can’t prevent it from happening, because our field is on a mountain slope,” he lamented.

In an effort to prevent future damage, the city government and the prefectural government are considering a plan to build an agricultural park near the mountain summit, where there is little possibility a landslide will occur.

The Saitama prefectural government has developed Sai no Kizuna, a high quality variety of rice resistant to high temperatures. The rice plant is about 15 centimeters shorter than that of the well-known Koshihikari variety, making it resistant to typhoons.

Rice farmers have been able to produce Sai no Kizuna even in intense heat. “By continuing to make modifications, we hope to develop a variety that won’t be affected by weather,” said Makoto Arakawa, 49, of the prefecture’s Saitama Agricultural Technology Research Center.

In addition to developing varieties resistant to heat, the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry is checking the water retention capabilities of paddy fields as a measure to cope with heavy rain.

“If we can learn the amount of water that can be retained, inundation can be delayed, reducing damage to residential areas and elsewhere,” a ministry official in charge said.

The ministry is also studying how to strengthen soil layers, to prevent fertile soil from getting washed away by heavy rain.

A special report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October stated that the world’s average temperature has already risen by about 1 C from the level before the Industrial Revolution.

If the warming continues, the figure could climb another 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052. The U.N. body has listed possible effects of global warming based on temperature increases.

“It’s important to implement measures that fully consider precipitation patterns and temperature fluctuations,” said Takasaki City University of Economics Prof. Takeshi Mizuguchi, who specializes in measures to counter global warming.

Hassan al-Kontar’s plight became widely known after he shared posts on social media that showed him surviving on donated airline meals, washing and giving himself a haircut in the toilets at Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s Terminal 2.

He had been stuck since March — blocked from entering Malaysia because of visa issues and barred from travelling to other countries, and was detained last month by immigration officials.

“I know I look like someone who ran from the stone or middle ages. I’m sorry for that,” the smiling 36-year-old said in a Twitter video Monday, looking tired and stroking his bushy beard.

“For the last eight years, it was (a) hard, long journey. The last 10 months, it was very hard and cold,” he added.

After Kontar’s arrest, Malaysian officials had said they were going to work with Syrian authorities to deport him back to his war-torn homeland.

But Kontar’s lawyer Andrew Brouwer said they brought the Syrian back to the Kuala Lumpur airport on Monday before he was put on a Vancouver-bound flight.

Brouwer said his client was recognised by Canada as a refugee and was granted permanent residency under the country’s refugee sponsorship programme.

“We were of course very pleased that Malaysia appeared to agree and abide by international law,” he said.

Malaysia’s immigration office said in a statement Tuesday it had held talks “on the basis of concern and humanity… with the embassy of the country that agreed to receive his relocation,” without naming Canada.

‘No more airports’

In the video on his Twitter account Kontar said he was in transit in Taiwan and that he would be reaching his “final destination” the following day.

“I could not do it without the support and the prayers from all of you,” he said.

In Vancouver, he was greeted by Laurie Cooper, who with the help of a group of residents in the ski resort of Whistler and the British Columbia Muslim Association, brought him to Canada and raised almost Can$15,000 for his fresh start.

Public broadcaster CBC said he looked “fragile in a blue T-shirt and jeans, his curly hair long and his beard unkempt” after disembarking.

“I’ve done my time in airports, no more airports,” he told the network after a sleepless flight across the Pacific.

“In Canada, here you have something very special, you have an amazing group of people who believe they can make a difference, and they can.”

Looking at Cooper, he said: “When I was thinking of hope, her face was coming to my mind.”

Before climbing into a car and heading to Whistler, where a bed, fresh clothes and a hotel job were awaiting him, he whispered to himself: “I will be fine.”

Kontar is not the only asylum seeker who has been left in limbo at an airport for a long period of time.

In 2015 an Iraqi family spent more than two months in an empty smoking cubicle in a Moscow airport, relying on passengers to bring them food and water.

Kontar’s case also recalls the 2004 film “The Terminal,” in which Tom Hanks plays a man who finds himself stuck in a New York airport after his government collapses, rendering his papers useless.

Millions of Syrians have fled a devastating seven-year civil war that has left more than 350,000 people dead.