NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

With the exception of young men, most people in Latin America and the Caribbean are living much longer today than 40 years ago. The mortality rate has dropped by at least 80 percent for children 4 years old or younger and by more than 50 percent for women between the ages of 20 and 44. For men between the ages of 15 and 19, however, the mortality rate has increased by 1 percent, largely due to deaths from road injuries and rising violence.

These are some of the findings released by the World Bank Group and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in a new report, The Global Burden of Disease: Generating Evidence, Guiding Policy. Latin America and Caribbean Regional Edition. The report also highlights the fact that the Latin America and Caribbean region (LAC) faces increasing threats from chronic disease, violence, and road traffic injuries. In the region, health loss from heart disease grew by 36 percent between 1990 and 2010, while interpersonal violence, depression and low back pain grew by 35, 40 and 57 percent, respectively.

The report is based on the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010), a collaborative effort of researchers from 50 countries around the world led by IHME at the University of Washington in the United States and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report finds that, similar to global trends, communicable, maternal, nutritional, and newborn diseases are becoming less important in LAC as non-communicable diseases kill more people prematurely and cause increasing disability.