Commentaries

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.

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.

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 this post, we delve into three countries that have worked to decrease smoking: Canada, Bolivia, and Japan. We hope that sharing these efforts will encourage journalists to report these initiatives more deeply!

On January 11, we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health. This was the first time the Surgeon General formally warned of the health hazards associated with smoking tobacco.

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.

Exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a baby’s life is one of the best ways to promote the baby’s health, as the American Academy of Pediatrics has noted, and breastfeeding provides both immediate- and long-term health benefits to infants.

With the holiday season upon on us, we have much to look forward to: family gatherings, holiday traditions, and of course, the favorite foods associated with the season. But this period of holiday revelry comes at the same time that doctors have noted a 5% increase of deaths from heart-related conditions between November and January.

Monsters lurking in the closet, getting lost in the grocery store, misplacing a favorite toy – these are some of the things I worried about growing up. But I was lucky in many respects. If I got pneumonia or was afflicted by a diarrheal disease, there was a very good chance it’d be treated quickly and with the right drugs.

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.

Fast-forward twenty years, and being a child in Russia in 2010 means that you’re likely to have much better health outcomes than you would have in 1990.

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.