Commentaries

The global health community cannot afford to ignore the problem of obesity and overweight. Globally, it killed 3.4 million people in 2010 alone. According to new findings published as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, more and more people in developing countries are joining the ranks of the world’s obese, especially women.

In order to solve a health problem, it may sound a bit obvious to say you first need to know what it is. A diagnosis. What may not be so obvious is that one of the biggest, and perhaps less appreciated challenges, in global health today is the lack of complete, accurate and comparable health data.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the burden of schistosomiasis – a disease caused by water-borne parasitic worms – disproportionately affects females. What’s more, it may explain why women uniquely account for a greater percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

It’s well known that malaria is a major killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, but it also causes substantial suffering, especially among children and the elderly.

Visualizing the different ways that alcohol impacts people’s health across regions also highlights how data can help policymakers choose approaches for combatting harmful alcohol use that make the most sense for their region. These approaches range from enforcement of drunk driving laws to alcohol taxes and programs to screen and treat alcoholics and discourage binge drinking.

These analyses indicate that if donors invest more global health dollars in Western and Central Africa as they have elsewhere on the continent, it may translate to accelerated health progress in these regions.

It may be hard to believe, but traffic accidents and vehicle emissions kill more people worldwide than AIDS.

The significant progress made against child mortality around the world over the last two decades is frequently cited as one of the biggest success stories of international development. Much more remains to be done, but it’s worth looking at what we know – and don’t know – about this propitious decline in child deaths.

Mental health problems have a profound impact on men and women worldwide, but the toll of these diseases weighs most heavily on women. Worldwide, depression is responsible for more healthy years lost than HIV/AIDS or malaria in women of all ages.

With the welcome decline in extreme poverty worldwide, many nations that once had to worry most about hunger now are struggling to combat the harm of over-eating, eating the wrong things and lack of physical activity.

We reported that for every dollar a government received in development assistance for health, the government's domestic expenditure on health decreased by $0.46 (95% confidence interval: 0.24, 0.67). Subsequent research questioned those findings, including Batniji and Bendavid in PLOS Medicine who have since admitted mistakes in their statistical model. We argue that these subsequent studies fail to account for the complex, dynamic connection between domestic and foreign funding sources.