News releases

The risk of dying from rheumatic heart disease, a condition of damaged heart valves caused by bacterial infection that leads to rheumatic fever, has dropped around the world over the last 25 years, according to a new scientific study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Latest global estimates illustrate the vast impact of the two most common chronic respiratory diseases, with 3.2 million deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and 0.4 million deaths caused by asthma in 2015, according to a new Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.

Suicide, homicide, and sexual assault are increasing much faster in the Eastern Mediterranean Region than any other region in the world, according to a new scientific study.

Globally, more than 2 billion children and adults suffer from health problems related to being overweight or obese, and an increasing percentage of people die from these health conditions, according to a new study.

The number of child deaths caused by diarrhea reduced by a third between 2005-2015, but mortality rates remain highest in some of the world’s poorest countries, with diarrhea killing almost half a million children under 5 years old each year worldwide, according to a new Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

A first-ever global study finds massive inequity of access to and quality of health care among and within countries, and concludes people are dying from causes with well-known treatments.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), including heart diseases and stroke, continue to account for one-third of deaths throughout the world, according to a new scientific study.

Although the absolute difference in US county-level cardiovascular disease mortality rates have declined substantially over the past 35 years for both ischemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, large differences remain, according to a study published by JAMA.

Nearly two in three deaths worldwide are still undocumented, meaning no death certificate is produced to account for the death or what caused it. To fill this massive knowledge gap, newly updated software that can identify the underlying cause of death from a survey of people familiar with the final illness of the deceased was launched today (April 7, 2017).

 Babies born today in 13 US counties have shorter expected lifespans than their parents did when they were born decades ago, according to a new study. For example, life expectancy at birth in Owsley County, Kentucky, was 72.4 in 1980, dropping to 70.2 in 2014.

Spending on health care by nations is expected to increase significantly over the next two decades, but the rates of increase and sources of spending will differ widely, according to a new analysis.

Despite strong declines in the rate of tobacco smoking over the past 25 years, one out of every four men still smoke daily, as do one out of every 20 women. In a new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study (GBD) published today (April 5, 2017) in The Lancet, authors discovered that the prevalence of daily smoking declined on a global scale – decreasing by 28% for men and 34% for women between 1990 and 2015.

Deaths among children and adolescents decreased worldwide from nearly 14.2 million deaths in 1990 to just over 7.2 million deaths in 2015 but this global progress has been uneven, according to a new article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.

A new study shows that the Eastern Mediterranean Region is witnessing an increase in chronic disorders, including mental illness.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) announced today the foundation’s commitment to invest $279 million in IHME to expand its work over the next decade.