IHME experts speak

We propose a Lives Saved Scorecard to drive funding and policy attention to where it is most needed. The ideal scorecard would track all investments by donors and governments, the coverage of each life-saving intervention, the quality of interventions delivered, and the link to child deaths averted in a cross-country, comparable manner.

There’s plenty of moral and rhetorical support for fighting diseases of poverty, but if you look at global health spending trends lately the story is one of stagnation, or even decline.

People are living longer, but with more disease and disability: an unprecedented transition from a world with communicable diseases to one with chronic disease and disability, with implications for welfare of people worldwide. Yet health systems and economies are not prepared for this transition. Instead, asymmetry between health-system responses and the growing needs is worsening, as are inequalities.

A lot of progress has been made against measles, but many around the world remain unlucky when it comes to this deadly and disabling disease. And bad luck, when it comes to infectious disease, travels.

The benefits of breastfeeding to the health and development of newborn children are well-documented, with ‘exclusive’ breastfeeding in the first six months of life shown to enhance children’s immunity to infectious disease

Like many fields, public health is in the midst of a data revolution: randomized control trials, pay-for-performance and value calculations, all based on data, are changing our ideas about what works and how to finance it.

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.

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.

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.

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.