Category Archives: Global health trends

Major improvements in global life expectancy, Africa is starting to catch up

Posted on May 19, 2016 by colinmathers

Today we released World Health Statistics 2016, our annual publication summarizing information on the health of the world’s people . Global average life expectancy increased by 5 years between 2000 and 2015, the fastest increase since the 1960s. Those gains … Continue reading →

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Did the world achieve the Millenium Development Goals for health?

Posted on May 10, 2016 by colinmathers

In 2015 the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) come to the end of their term, and a post-2015 agenda, comprising 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), takes their place. My Department published a report in December 2015 assessing the achievement of the … Continue reading →

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Maternal mortality has been almost halved in the last 25 years.

Posted on November 16, 2015 by colinmathers

Last week, we released the latest global estimates of maternal mortality from the UN Interagency Group led by WHO (also includes UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank and UN Population Division) http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/news These also represent our final assessment of country, regional and … Continue reading →

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Child deaths in 2015: much accomplished, but more to do

Posted on September 9, 2015 by colinmathers

In 2000, world leaders agreed on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). MDG 4 called for a two-thirds reduction in the under-5 mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. Today the UN Interagency Group on Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME), which my team … Continue reading →

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Does the Global Burden of Disease study substantially overestimate road traffic deaths in OECD countries?

Posted on August 30, 2015 by colinmathers

Another area of big difference between the IHME Global Burden of Disease Study and WHO global statistics relates to road injury deaths in developed countries. Dan Hogan and I have just published a comment comparing our statistics with the GBD … Continue reading →

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Deaths of older children: what do the data tell us?

Posted on August 26, 2015 by colinmathers

The Millenium Development Goals focused attention on child mortality under age 5 (where it is the highest) and the world has halved the child death rate from 1990 to 2015 (is-the-world-achieving-the-health-related-MDGs). Much less attention has been paid to older children … Continue reading →

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Global life expectancy increasing at the frontier rate

Posted on May 22, 2015 by colinmathers

WHO Department of Mortality and Burden of Disease coordinator Colin Mathers told Voice of America that astonishing progress has been made in global life expectancy. “We are estimating that over the 25 years of the Millennium Development Goal period, there … Continue reading →

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Is the world achieving the health-related Millenium Development Goals?

Posted on May 15, 2015 by colinmathers

We published World Health Statistics 2015 this week. It assesses progress towards the health-related goals in each of the 194 countries for which data are available. The results are mixed. By the end of this year if current trends continue, … Continue reading →

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Global health risks Russian edition

Posted on April 24, 2015 by colinmathers

One of our most popular WHO reports has been Global Health Risks: Mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks, published in 2009.  A Russian version has just been released by WHO, due to popular demand. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/44203/8/9789244563878_rus.pdf This … Continue reading →

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WHO and global health statistics

Posted on March 13, 2015 by colinmathers

Ties Boerma and I have just published a short paper in BMC Medicine (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/50) which discusses the role of WHO and other global health agencies in the preparation and publication of global, regional and country-level health statistics. There has been … Continue reading →

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