They've had remarkable life expectancy with the malaria as well. I'm sure everybody would prefer dying from malaria than MS, getting blind or an amputee from diabetes, and so on. Improvements in life expectancy today is not an improvement of overall health, just the medicine found ways to keep sicker people alive for longer (i.e. countering natural selection). If infectious diseases like tuberculosis and others were eradicated just a couple of centuries earlier, modern medicine today wouldn't be so proud of the accomplishments in life expectancy! Unfortunately, due to widespread abuse, antibiotics are no longer the panacea that they used to be!