Commentaries

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.

Since the epidemic’s peak in 1995, Uganda has seen an impressive 53.3% reduction in death rates from HIV/AIDS.

A trends showed that premature mortality and illness from HIV/AIDS rose a devastating 329% between 1990 and 2010 in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, it’s noteworthy that Uganda’s experience with HIV/AIDS differs from much of sub-Saharan Africa.

In Central Latin America, cervical cancer was the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women in 2010. Globally, the leading cancer among women is lung cancer, followed by breast, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancers.

This is what my parents have been telling me since I was 3 – that eating more broccoli and fewer SpaghettiOs leads to a healthier life. And when you drill down into the data, you see that young people in the US (between 15 and 49) are actually improving over time in terms of dietary risk factors.

Children between the ages of 5 and 14 are particularly susceptible because they are more likely to play in soil that may be contaminated by hookworm. Unfortunately, infected children may experience developmental problems caused by anemia.

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.

The ‘positive deviant’ that really jumped out at us shows that there is actually a whole lot more to Kentucky than fried chicken. Its physical activity rankings have shot through the roof.

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.

We all know that China has changed tremendously over the last two decades — economically, culturally, and even politically.  How have these changes translated to the country’s health?

Hello journalists! This week, we travel to Western Europe, where people are better-dressed and die from fewer road traffic accidents. Johanna Carr, one of IHME’s student assistants, tells us about how Western Europe is a positive outlier — globally, and among rich countries — in road traffic safety.

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.

One of the things you can do with health data is compare neighbors, and it adds an extra dimension if there has been a history of conflict between countries. Iraq and Iran. Pakistan and India. North Korea and South Korea. Often the more economically successful of the two countries also is the country with better health outcomes. That’s why I was surprised recently to see how well Armenia does compared to Turkey in a number of measures.

As discussed in this post, SJN and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation have teamed up to provide all of you with global health insights, based on Global Burden of Disease data. Here’s the first one, written by William Heisel, Director of Communications at IHME.

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.