Commentaries

Many governments are trying to make it harder for the tobacco industry to do business in their countries.

With wars taking place in several regions of the world right now, and regular news accounts of violent deaths in the United States, it seems like it would be easy to tally up the countries where people face the highest likelihood of dying from interpersonal violence.

When people in rural Uganda or Kenya don’t get the care they need or want, for example, we don’t always know why. Is it because local health facilities don’t stock the medications, or have enough trained medical staff? Did patients have to wait too long for service – or do they think their local health facility isn’t clean or has the services they need, and so they don’t seek care in the first place?

Five years after a massive earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, the crowded capital of Haiti, killing between 160,000 and 200,000 people and displacing more than 1.5 million people to tent camps, there are signs of improvement.

We’ve learned that falls are the leading cause of death for elderly Americans, and that this is due in part to the shrinkage of people’s brains as they age – leading to extra risk of “jostling” from falls. In the US, fall prevention has become a major priority for nursing homes nationwide, and the National Institute on Aging has recently embarked on a $30 million dollar study on reducing fall injuries.

The GBD researchers, who this year focused on mortality trends between 1990 and 2013, discovered that cirrhosis as a cause of death – which has seldom received much attention as a leading killer – is on the increase even as global interventions targeting infectious diseases have produced major reductions in mortality from some of the more high-profile deadly diseases such as AIDS, malaria or TB.

A massive cause-of-death study finds that we are living about six years longer than we did in 1990, that child deaths have plummeted thanks to greatly expanded immunizations, among other things, and that non-communicable diseases like diabetes are gaining prominence as top killers largely because of big gains made against infectious diseases.

While many communicable diseases have been shrinking in terms of the number of people they affect over the last two decades, the global burden of mental illness has largely remained the same. All forms of mental illness – including depression, anxiety and schizophrenia – account for nearly a quarter of all disability worldwide, and cause the most disability for those in the most productive age demographic, from 15 to 39 years old.

There appears to be a disconnect between the global burden of pneumonia and how much money is spent on attempting to reduce this burden, which Humanosphere recently summed up as: Pneumonia leads in killing children, but not in global health financing.

Pneumonia may be the leading killer of children, but that doesn’t mean it is a priority for global health spending. Only 2 percent of the $30.6 billion in international assistance spent on health care was directed to the disease. The impact is clear, progress against pneumonia deaths is not keeping up with other lesser child killers.

“We should declare the goal of eradicating malaria because we can eradicate malaria,” Gates said, to some consternation among the malaria experts. He challenged the audience to wipe out malaria for good, as the world did with smallpox in 1980, rather than continuing to simply contain the disease.

Maternal mortality is a popular subject in global health, but what about the many women who suffer disability as a result of pregnancy and childbirth?

En 1992 fui elegido alcalde de Cali, una ciudad de Colombia con 2.3 millones de habitantes. Soy epidemiólogo por formación, pero me siento atraído a ayudar a las personas, y Cali necesitaba ayuda. La tasa de homicidios era alarmante, más de 100 por cada 100.000 (las estadísticas del FBI del mismo año indican que esta tasa en Nueva York era de 27.1 por 100.000), y los homicidios eran la principal causa de fallecimiento en la ciudad.

Before the civil war started the spring of 2011, Syria was among the most impressive health success stories in the Arab world. Out of all the countries in this region, Syria ranked third for gains in female life expectancy and fourth for gains in male life expectancy between 1990 and 2010.

My advice to leaders: Skip the pronouncements and dig into the data.

The health systems in these poor countries are overwhelmed by this outbreak and the progress that’s been made in fighting these diseases, or in improving services like maternal and child care, is under threat. High-quality, timely data are urgently needed to understand how the Ebola epidemic is affecting other health issues in these three nations.

The War on Drugs has failed, a blue-ribbon panel of experts has concluded, and has actually made things worse.

As global leaders repeatedly fail to reach agreements on setting emissions targets to slow the rate of global warming, local communities are taking action to protect themselves from a leading driver of climate change: the burning of fossil fuels.

In the countries most affected by the outbreak, family members of victims have become outcasts out of fear that they will transmit the virus. Panic about the virus is spreading globally.

But when it comes to the health situation in Israel and Palestine, the lopsided death tolls during periods of conflict are only the tip of the iceberg.

Studies have shown that, done right, public discussion of celebrity suicides can help educate people and prevent those at risk from taking their own lives. What will be surprising to many is that, worldwide, more years of life are lost as a result of suicide than

Eastern and Southern sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 55% of total deaths from HIV/AIDS in 2013. In most countries in these regions, deaths from the disease are dropping. Such progress, however, must be considered along with countries where death rates have stagnated or even increased.

Despite this progress, major challenges remain: there were an estimated 11.9 million cases of tuberculosis (TB) worldwide in 2013, including those individuals with HIV (11.2 million excluding those with HIV); more effective vaccines against the disease are badly needed; and multidrug resistant TB is a growing threat.