(I)Basically the increasing rate of world population growth is the result of recent advances in medicine. (II)Yet, despite these advances, there are certain points where medicine still remains helpless. (III)Mainly over the past century, infant mortality has been reduced to a small fraction of the old figures. (IV)Powerful new drugs are at hand to control threatened epidemics which might previously have decimated whole populations. (V) As a result, expectation of life at birth has been doubled in many countries