For policymaking, planning, and advocacy, decision-makers need to know how funding to developing countries for health improvement changed in the wake of the global financial crisis. According to IHME researchers, development assistance for health (DAH) continued to grow in 2011, but the rate of growth was low.
Financing Global Health 2011: Continued Growth as MDG Deadline Approaches offers a comprehensive view of trends in public and private financing of health assistance with preliminary estimates for health financing in the most recent years. It shows that development assistance for health (DAH) continues to rise, albeit at a slower rate than before the recession.
Developed countries and funding agencies are putting the brakes on growth in development assistance for health, raising the possibility that developing countries will have an even harder time meeting the Millennium Development Goal deadline looming in 2015.
Noncommunicable diseases and related risk factors are the leading causes of disease burden in Iran and other middle-income countries. High blood pressure caused 80,000 deaths in Iran in 2005, and hyperglycemia caused 34,000 deaths in that year.
New research shows that innovative and improved methods for analyzing verbal autopsies – a method of determining individuals’ causes of death in countries without a complete vital registration system – are fast, effective, and inexpensive, and could be invaluable for countries struggling to understand disease trends.
An ambitious, large-scale HIV/AIDS public health program prevented an estimated 100,000 new infections over five years in the parts of India hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic, indicating that HIV prevention programs that target high-risk groups can reduce HIV rates in the broader population.
Compared to four other risk factors, high systolic blood pressure had the largest impact on mortality in Iran, causing an estimated 80,000 annual deaths in 2005, according to researchers at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education, IHME, and Imperial College London.
Avahan, a program aimed at preventing HIV in India, averted an estimated 100,178 HIV infections between 2003 and 2008, according to researchers at IHME, the Public Health Foundation of India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India, and the University of Hong Kong.
With four years left for countries to achieve international targets for saving the lives of mothers and children, more than half the countries around the world are lowering maternal mortality and child mortality at an accelerated rate, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
More than half of the countries around the world are lowering maternal and child mortality at an accelerated rate, according to a study conducted by researchers at IHME and the University of Queensland.
The number of cases and deaths from breast and cervical cancer are rising in most countries, especially in the developing world where more women are dying at younger ages, according to a new global analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
Globally, the chance that a woman would develop breast cancer during her lifetime was 5.5% in 2010, as shown in IHME’s policy report The Challenge Ahead: Progress and Setbacks in Breast and Cervical Cancer.
The number of cases and deaths from breast and cervical cancer are rising in most countries, especially in the developing world where more women are dying at younger ages, according to a new study.
Children who live in households that own at least one insecticide-treated bed net are less likely to be infected with malaria and less likely to die from the disease, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
Children who live in households that own at least one insecticide-treated mosquito net (ITN), also known as bed nets, are less likely to be infected with malaria and less likely to die from the disease, according to new study.
Choosing the best method for verbal autopsy (VA) requires the appropriate metrics to assess a given method’s performance, and researchers from IHME and the University of Queensland undertook a study to determine these metrics.
The vital registration system in Mexico relies on information collected from death certificates to generate official mortality figures. A study by researchers at IHME and the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico set out to test the validity of this system.
New research from IHME, the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington, and the University of Queensland as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC) shows that the Simplified Symptom Pattern (SSP) method can be used to accurately interpret verbal autopsies (VAs).
The creation of the first strictly defined gold standard database of diagnoses for causes of death will help strengthen verbal autopsy (VA) methods in low-resource settings, according to a study published by a global group of researchers, the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC), which includes researchers from IHME.
An innovative method of computer-coded verbal autopsy, the Random Forest (RF) Method from machine learning, was found to outperform physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) in almost all settings, according to a study by researchers from IHME and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
The Tariff method, an easy-to-use tool developed by researchers at IHME for turning verbal autopsy (VA) results into meaningful cause of death data for health workers and policymakers, is capable of outperforming the more costly physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) approach in most cases, according to new research by IHME as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
InterVA, an automated and widely available tool for assigning cause of death using verbal autopsies (VAs), does not perform as well as other methods, such as physician-certified verbal autopsy (PCVA) and the Simplified Symptom Pattern (SSP) method, according to a study published by researchers at IHME and the University of Queensland, as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
The King and Lu (KL) method for directly estimating the fraction of all deaths in a population due to a given cause has been used to interpret verbal autopsies (VAs) in areas with incomplete vital registration systems.
Physician certification is the most widely used method for interpreting verbal autopsy (VA), yet physicians correctly determine cause of death less than half of the time, according to new research by IHME and the University of Queensland as part of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC).
