Acting on Data

Everyone deserves to live a long life in full health. Inspired and fueled by this idea, the Global Burden of Disease study, or GBD, seeks to answer the question of what sickens and kills people of all ages around the world. 

In his 2017 National Day Rally speech, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong expressed his commitment to tackling an important challenge facing the country: Singaporeans are living some of the longest lives in the world, but, particularly in old age, they are not always healthy ones.  

In Rwanda, IHME’s collaborators are using GBD data as they tackle the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and improve care for people living with disabilities.

The Global Burden of Disease study (GBD) has been compared to many landmark events: the advent of the encyclopedia, the mapping of the human genome, and the first landing on the moon.

In a new series of papers published yesterday, the GBD Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) collaborators describe the disease burden of the 22 countries that make up the EMR. While wars and civil unrest are currently the primary cause of death and disability in many Middle Eastern countries, the authors of the studies point out that other pressing issues are also multiplying both due to and alongside the ongoing unrest.

In his annual letter on philanthropy, Michael Bloomberg – founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and former mayor of New York City – emphasizes the importance of following the data no matter where it leads us in global health. And by drawing on data from the GBD study, Bloomberg and his organization find themselves looking squarely at non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and their growing impact worldwide.

With rising threats from non-communicable diseases and emerging infectious diseases, effective global health leadership is vital. In their new book, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why, Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridhar use findings on global health spending from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to better understand the different actors in the global health space and look at how well they are helping address the world’s health problems. 

In Ethiopia the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is being used to support the Ministry of Health’s drive to strengthen evidence-based decision-making, in collaboration with key partners.

In Sweden, the Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institute, and the Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine (CES) collaborated with IHME to develop estimates for the burden of disease in Stockholm County. These are now a key feature of the county’s Public Health Guide, which serves as a valuable reference for Stockholm’s government and civil society as they work to promote health and prevent disease. 

Some people smoke and live seemingly long lives. Yet tobacco is unquestionably harmful. How do we reconcile the two? A recent post published on the Brookings Institute’s Future Development blog used Global Burden of Disease data to educate readers about “selection bias,” or the human tendency to focus on anecdotal accounts that defy the trends while ignoring the much larger body of evidence that supports them. 

During his recent visit to IHME’s offices, we sat down with Dr. Yohannes Kinfu, member of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study’s Scientific Council and the person who came up with the idea that led to the creation of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a new metric for measuring development. SDI allows people to compare countries’ health outcomes and the performance of health systems, and better understand what tomorrow’s health landscape will look like.