Nancy Fullman

Pneumonia kills more children under five each year than any other infectious disease – causing over 900,000 deaths each year. With nearly 60% of child pneumonia deaths occurring in countries deemed as “fragile states," the time is now to rejuvenate funding and programmes targeting these geographies.

We know what works to fight pneumonia in children. Improving access to prompt diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia and scaling up vaccines that protect children against particularly deadly strains has occurred in many countries. So why has progress against pneumonia fallen behind?

July 2015 saw two big milestones for Nigeria’s quest to eliminate polio. First, the country hit the one-year mark of recording zero polio cases, a significant achievement in global health. Second, Nigeria finished introducing the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) into routine immunization systems in five more states, accelerating the new vaccine’s implementation.

Since 2013, SJN has partnered with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to share instances of exceptional progress and success in public health (known as “positive deviants”) using research and data produced at IHME. This weekly series highlights a timely example of positive deviance and shows you what locality has seen the most gains. We don’t, however, always know why such successes took place, which is why we look to journalists like you, in hopes that you’ll use these data as inspiration for stories. Run with the data. Report. Research. Find out how these countries are succeeding–and publish what you find with the world.

Educating women saves lives – and the world is getting better at doing both.

The benefits of breastfeeding to the health and development of newborn children are well-documented, with ‘exclusive’ breastfeeding in the first six months of life shown to enhance children’s immunity to infectious disease

As improving the quality of health services and people’s access to them becomes more of a global priority (especially in the wake of the Ebola crisis), it’s easy to forget that “health” – how we live and die, and how we interact with health systems – rarely happens at the country-level. Global health leaders want to “ensure that every country [have] a robust and resilient health system,” but we also need to look at the wide variations happening within a country to learn from successful, local initiatives.

Today is World Tuberculosis Day, a time where international organizations turn a spotlight on the burden of tuberculosis (TB) and heightened action against this deadly disease.

With America’s measles outbreak still spreading to new corners of the country, the public’s response is also become increasingly charged. Families are demanding that schools and pediatricians bar unvaccinated children from their premises. Political debates over how or if immunizations should be mandatory have exploded amid the rising measles case count.

If you’re a health worker in Uganda, what do you need in order to provide the best possible care for your patients – people who could be suffering from anything from HIV to broken limbs? You need a range of medicines and other medical supplies, like stethoscopes or blood pressure cuffs. And of course enough medical personnel.

For the global health field, 2015 is a year with a lot riding on it. The deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) looms, and deliberations continue about the post-MDG world should approach sustainable development (and what that should even mean). We’re celebrating improved survival in much of the world, yet we’re still struggling to contain Ebola in West Africa and less traditional “public health” problems, such as violence, are on rise in many places.

Literally millions of stories can be found in this new body of results (or explored online with IHME’s data visualization suite). Today, we’re taking a deeper dive into a public health success story where the link between policy efforts and improved health outcomes is only tightening: tobacco control, and in particular, Uruguay’s efforts to take on its tobacco epidemic.

There appears to be a disconnect between the global burden of pneumonia and how much money is spent on attempting to reduce this burden, which Humanosphere recently summed up as: Pneumonia leads in killing children, but not in global health financing.

What causes more deaths than HIV, malaria, and measles—combined? Bet you didn’t guess pneumonia.

Despite the fact that in 2013, a child died from pneumonia every 35 seconds, minimal funding has gone to addressing this serious public health issue.

“We should declare the goal of eradicating malaria because we can eradicate malaria,” Gates said, to some consternation among the malaria experts. He challenged the audience to wipe out malaria for good, as the world did with smallpox in 1980, rather than continuing to simply contain the disease.

The rallying cry at this year’s meeting for the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH), which ended yesterday, was “Accelerating to Zero,” the Gates Foundation’s vision to eradicate malaria. Many places are nearly there: China is closing in on zero malaria and Saudi Arabia is within a few cases of ending malaria for good.

Amid the fierce debate and public outcry over American cities quarantining health workers returning from West Africa, at least one difficult question has also emerged: what are the other optimal measures, perhaps more balanced across legal rights and public health needs, we should use against a deadly infectious disease that doesn’t carry a passport?

Measles is another infectious disease that can very rapidly upend and ravage any place where people lack exposure or protection against the virus.

A 2010 study found that the screening and treatment of infected mothers (thus preventing mother-to-child transmission of syphilis) is “among the most cost-effective public health interventions in existence.”

In the US and globally, ALS certainly claims fewer lives each year than more common diseases. Cancer, for example, caused 204 deaths per 100,000 in the US in 2010. At the same time, these more common diseases generally have much better treatment options and longer-term prognoses – and many of them can even be prevented.

Since 2009, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has published annual reports tracking development assistance for health (DAH), striving to improve the methods by which we collectively quantify the amount of money that development partners, governments, and other organizations spend to improve health worldwide.

Here, we take a deeper dive into Zambia’s health landscape, and how the country has improved its delivery of health interventions.

The world has seen tremendous progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS over the last decade, documenting huge advances in treatment effectiveness, access to affordable drugs, and ways to prevent further transmission of the deadly virus.

As it turns out, Costa Rica has been scoring big on and off the soccer pitch – especially for child health. Between 1990 and 2010, the small Central American country documented a 48% decline in rates of premature mortality from preterm birth complications and a 53% decrease from neonatal encephalopathy.

Nationally, in 1996, 27% of American men were daily smokers (this is also known as prevalence of daily smoking). Sixteen years later, in 2012, prevalence dropped to 22%. Similar progress was found among American women, with rates of daily smoking falling from 22% to 18% between 1996 and 2012.

March 24 is World TB Day, and organizers are calling for a “global effort to find, treat, and cure” everyone who has tuberculosis (TB) and to “accelerate progress toward eliminating TB for good.”

In Seattle, I often take walking – and getting to my destination safely – for granted.  When I’m not bussing somewhere or riding my bike as a means of transport, it’s all on my two feet to get me from A to B.  Aside from dodging the occasional cyclist or texting-while-walking offender, I rarely feel as if I’m at-risk of bodily harm.

This week I had the opportunity to help launch the results from an impact evaluation assessing district-level trends in intervention coverage and child mortality in Zambia. One of the most striking results – for both IHME researchers and colleagues in Zambia – was the country’s remarkable scale-up of exclusive breastfeeding (EBF), or solely breastfeeding children for the first six months of life.

Weibrecht was born in Olympic territory: Lake Placid, New York, home to the winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980. Lake Placid is in Essex County, one of the healthier counties nationwide, with high life expectancy, high rates of physical activity, and relatively low rates of obesity and hypertension. The county is likely helped by an abundance of natural playgrounds and ability to attract athletic types.

Several countries documented even greater success in reducing their burdens of rheumatic heart disease. Here we briefly explore two of them and how they may have achieved this progress.

The Lancet published a special series on January 20 titled “Health in the Arab World,” which delves into the health successes and challenges found in countries from Algeria to Yemen. Harnessing the research produced through the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project, IHME documented the region’s disease burdens and health trends from 1990 to 2010 as part of this issue.

In global health, 2013 was a big year – especially if you wanted to really dive into data and find stories behind the world’s health successes and challenges.

This year’s theme, “Shared Responsibility: Strengthening Results for an AIDS-Free Generation,” reminds us of the event’s original mission in 1988: uniting people, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, to fight the lethal virus and to honor individuals who have died trying.

As highlighted by IHME’s recently published report based on the Global Burden of Disease 2010 study, several countries in the European Union (EU) have bucked the global trend and either maintained or recorded declines in rates of health loss from diabetes (as measured by rates of disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs).

Yesterday was World Pneumonia Day (#WPD2013 on Twitter), a sobering reminder that the simple disease is the largest killer for children under 5. It killed 1.1 million children in 2012, more than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

A few weeks ago, we examined declining household air pollution in Peru. In that post, we highlighted the country’s remarkable progress in reducing premature mortality and illness from the risk factor between 1990 and 2010. But what diseases have been most affected?

Today is World Stroke Day, a day dedicated to heightening awareness about a condition that afflicts at least one in every six people during their lifetimes. However, this statistic is far from inevitable, as the American Stroke Association emphasizes that stroke is largely preventable, treatable, and beatable.

As of 2010, road injuries became the ninth leading cause of death among developing countries, leading to about as many deaths as malaria. In sub-Saharan Africa, 84% more deaths from road injuries occurred in 2010 than 1990.

“Moving toward malaria elimination” is the theme of the 6^th MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference, which is a meeting of global malaria minds and might in Durban, South Africa happening right now.

The Millennium Development Goals, known as MDGs, are comprised of eight overarching anti-poverty targets that were set by global leaders at the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000. Ranging from gender equality to HIV/AIDS reduction, the MDGs describe explicit goals to achieve by 2015.

For many, Peru is known for its stunning mountain landscapes and rich history. The crisp, clean air surrounding the likes of Machu Picchu only heightens the breathtaking sights found at the end of the trek. Unfortunately, this air quality is not found everywhere in Peru, especially in rapidly growing – and increasingly polluted – cities like Lima.

One of my favorite things about working at IHME is trying to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not in global health, to identify which places are achieving better health outcomes and where progress may be lagging.

On July 10, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published a suite of new papers and data visualizations focused on health trends in the United States, ranging from county-level results on life expectancy to broader, national findings for disease burdens.

It only seemed natural to host a population health-based battle of the sexes, using data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010 study to determine the winner.

Today’s positive deviant comes to us from the Land Down Under!  Turns out that in a country associated with beer-drinking bros… there are fewer alcohol-related DALYs among 20 to 24-year old males.

Jolie’s humanitarian work as a UN Goodwill Ambassador has brought her to numerous lower-income countries. Largely focused on refugee emergencies and challenges, Jolie has said that her job is to “draw attention to the…human tragedies that you will not find in the headlines.”

Today’s positive deviance comes to us from the tiny sub-Saharan African country of Swaziland. Malaria is a top killer in the region, but is on the path of being completely eliminated in Swaziland.