Reducing risks to health: what can we learn from the Global Burden of Disease 2010 Study?

Excerpt

Debates about health priorities are likely to be better informed if there is a reasonable understanding among policy makers of the comparative importance of various diseases and injuries in the population, at different ages, and how this pattern of health loss is changing over time. Indeed, provided such a description of the epidemiological profile of a population is sufficiently comprehensive, and every effort has been made to ensure comparability of measurement across diseases and injuries, the results can provide a meaningful accounting of the relative importance of different conditions in causing premature death and disability, and hence, guide the need for various intervention strategies. This was the basis for undertaking the first Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study in the early 1990s which was commissioned and used by the World Bank to help define intervention packages designed to maximize population health gains for countries at different levels of health development (World Bank 1993; Murray and Lopez 1996). …