People's average life span in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has more than doubled in the past 60 years, a regional health official said Friday.

In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, average life expectancy was 31 years. Today it is 71 years, said Memet Yasin, head of the regional health bureau.

"The residents are living longer because they have received better medical treatment during the past 60 years," he said, noting that progress had been "especially remarkable" in rural areas.

Since the the PRC's foundation, infant mortality rate has slumped from 42-60 percent to 1 percent.

"There were only 54 township clinics in the region before 1949, and varieties of vicious infections were prevalent," Yasin said. "By the end of 2008, there were 6,739 health agencies in Xinjiang with a total of 97,000 hospital beds."

Infections that once made people in Xinjiang severely ill, such as poliomyelitis, pneumonic plague, and cholera have been nearly exterminated for more than a decade, he said.

About 62 percent of rural women in Xinjiang had undergone at least one gynecological examination during the previous year, up from 49 percent in 2003, according to statistics from a national medical services survey in 2008.

At present the regional government subsidizes 95 percent of Xinjiang people for 80 percent of their medical fees, Yasin said.

(Xinhua News Agency August 8, 2009)