Resources

Environmental quality has a profound effect on health and the burden of disease. In the United States, the environment-related burden of disease is increasingly dominated by chronic diseases. At the local level, public health practitioners realize that many policy decisions affecting environmental quality and health transcend the authorities of traditional health department programs.

Every year, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)—mainly heart and lung disease, cancer, and diabetes—kill 41 million people globally. Together, NCDs are the leading cause of death and disease in the world and, when governments take action, they are preventable. But one risk factor, air pollution, is largely ignored by the global health community.

There is considerable value in exploring whether and how a limited set of common health metrics, such as the ones presented in this supplement, can produce valid and reliable estimates of impact for global health and family planning.

The impetus and opportunities for improving birth, death, and cause of death data have never been more propitious. Renewed country commitment to strengthen civil registration systems is clearly evident, supported by nascent regional coalitions of technical and development organisations.

Many African countries have extremely low ratios of physicians to population, and there are very, very few specialists. This leaves most patients without access to specialised care, and importantly also leaves many countries with insufficient expertise to properly evaluate the burden of illness and the needs of the population overall.

The current global TB epidemic can and should be viewed as a basic human rights and ethical issue: millions of people around the world are being either undertreated or overtreated for a curable illness, leaving them vulnerable to long-lasting and avoidable health, economic, and social consequences.

Public health was born from crises. Before the influenza pandemic of 1918, many diseases were seen as something that mostly affected the poor, to be blamed on those who had not pulled themselves out of poverty.

The ability to reliably evaluate the impact of interventions and changes in hypertension prevalence and control is critical if the burden of hypertension-related disease is to be reduced.

Of all adult primary care interventions, improvement in the management of hypertension treatment can save the most lives and can also reduce spending on the management of patients with heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, and other preventable complications of uncontrolled hypertension.

Large-scale epidemics and pandemics pose a serious threat, not only to global health security but also to countries, communities and individuals in their efforts to achieve resilience. The threat of emerging infectious diseases, including those of zoonotic origin, and the increasing prevalence of diseases previously controlled by antimicrobials and vaccination efforts, is a cause for concern to the global health community. Communities play an important role in prevention, early detection and early response regarding this threat.