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

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Bill Gates, Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), and other experts and leaders gathered this month in Geneva for a very important meeting on a very unimportant-sounding subject: global disease estimates.

The impetus was the release of the Global Burden Disease (GBD) Study, the most comprehensive and ambitious effort to date to quantify the world’s health status. Led by Chris Murray and his colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the GBD study involved 486 collaborators from 302 institutions in 50 countries. In a field in which donors and policymakers have lacked basic health data, such as birth and death registries, for many countries, the GBD study assesses 291 diseases and injuries and 67 risk factors in 187 countries over a 20-year period (1990-2010).