How not go get cancer

The Global Burden of Disease project is a decades long international collaboration, based at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, but involving researchers around the world. It was originally funded by the World Bank, and now receives its principal support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. GBD (not to be confused with golden brown and delicious) essentially tries to quantify the prevalence of diseases, and injuries around the world; the prevalence of associated disability; causes of death; and risk factors. They use a lot of complicated methods. If you ' re really interested you can read about them on the GBD website. There is certainly room for controversy about the accuracy of some of their estimates -- data sources are not great in many places -- and also about the philosophical validity of some of their concepts. But for understanding the essential challenges for public health around the world, they ' re the best we ' ve got.One construct I do need to explain for this post is the Disability Adjusted Life Year, or DALY. It doesn ' t actually tell us very much to just enumerate the causes of death. Everybody dies, after all, so what matter is at what age and what state of health they are in before they shuffle off this mortal coil. You could quantify the former just by using a metric called Life Years Lost -- assume that people naturally will live to some arbitrary age, say current life expectancy at birth*, and for...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs