This figure shows the relative value assigned to each year of life in the calculation of disease burden. Source:World Bank, 1993 . The relative value of a life year is below one for children under 10, and for persons more than about 55 years of age. This implies that in the calculations, a life year lost for children is given less weight than a life year lost for adults below 55. The adjustments made, introduces (explicitly), a bias both against children and the elderly. In a defence of age-weights, Christopher Murray argues that there is a widespread preference for age weighting in most cultures (Murray, 1996), and, that on average, these preferences can be expressed as in the function given.