Commentaries

In the pantheon of human aches, pains and killer diseases, few might think back pain merits much attention. But, in fact, lower back pain ranks above diabetes and heart disease worldwide when measured according to a common health metrics yardstick known as Years Lived with Disability (YLDs).

We propose a Lives Saved Scorecard to drive funding and policy attention to where it is most needed. The ideal scorecard would track all investments by donors and governments, the coverage of each life-saving intervention, the quality of interventions delivered, and the link to child deaths averted in a cross-country, comparable manner.

There’s plenty of moral and rhetorical support for fighting diseases of poverty, but if you look at global health spending trends lately the story is one of stagnation, or even decline.

People are living longer, but with more disease and disability: an unprecedented transition from a world with communicable diseases to one with chronic disease and disability, with implications for welfare of people worldwide. Yet health systems and economies are not prepared for this transition. Instead, asymmetry between health-system responses and the growing needs is worsening, as are inequalities.

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.

A lot of progress has been made against measles, but many around the world remain unlucky when it comes to this deadly and disabling disease. And bad luck, when it comes to infectious disease, travels.

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

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that in Wisconsin, home of Miller Brewing and where bars outnumber grocery stores almost 3 to 1, rates of binge and heavy drinking are on the rise. In 2012, Wisconsin also had some of the highest rates of heavy drinking in the country.

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

Like many fields, public health is in the midst of a data revolution: randomized control trials, pay-for-performance and value calculations, all based on data, are changing our ideas about what works and how to finance it.

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.

Many governments are trying to make it harder for the tobacco industry to do business in their countries.

With wars taking place in several regions of the world right now, and regular news accounts of violent deaths in the United States, it seems like it would be easy to tally up the countries where people face the highest likelihood of dying from interpersonal violence.

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.

When people in rural Uganda or Kenya don’t get the care they need or want, for example, we don’t always know why. Is it because local health facilities don’t stock the medications, or have enough trained medical staff? Did patients have to wait too long for service – or do they think their local health facility isn’t clean or has the services they need, and so they don’t seek care in the first place?

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.

Five years after a massive earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, the crowded capital of Haiti, killing between 160,000 and 200,000 people and displacing more than 1.5 million people to tent camps, there are signs of improvement.

We’ve learned that falls are the leading cause of death for elderly Americans, and that this is due in part to the shrinkage of people’s brains as they age – leading to extra risk of “jostling” from falls. In the US, fall prevention has become a major priority for nursing homes nationwide, and the National Institute on Aging has recently embarked on a $30 million dollar study on reducing fall injuries.