Category Archives: World Health Organization

Global estimates of abortion rates by legality and region

Posted on May 16, 2022 by colinmathers

A little under two months ago, the Guttmacher Institute and WHO released first-ever country-level estimates of unintended pregnancy and abortion (see here). The new study analyzed data for 150 countries for the period 2015-2019 and found that: Almost half of … Continue reading →

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Are the Lancet authorship criteria adequate?

Posted on September 27, 2020 by colinmathers

In May, the Lancet published a peer-reviewed study claiming to analyse data from nearly 15,000 patients who had received the drug hydroxychloroquine for treatment of Covid-19. The study concluded that patients who received the drug were dying at a higher … Continue reading →

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WHO and global health statistics

Posted on August 25, 2020 by colinmathers

My paper “History of global burden of disease assessment at the World Health Organization”  has just been published in Archives of Public Health. It reviews WHO work on Global Burden of Disease over the last 20 years and the challenges … Continue reading →

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Drug overdose deaths – another exceptional US epidemic

Posted on July 18, 2020 by colinmathers

Earlier this week, CDC released provisional figures for drug overdose deaths in the USA in 2019. They estimate almost 72,000 deaths, the highest annual number yet seen. Initially driven by prescription opioid painkillers, users migrated first to heroin and then … Continue reading →

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WHO and the Global Burden of Disease

Posted on May 7, 2019 by colinmathers

As a former WHO staff member, who played a key role in the production and clearance of WHO health statistics over the last 15 years, and a long-time collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) enterprise and with the … Continue reading →

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New estimates of the causes of child death under age 5

Posted on December 9, 2018 by colinmathers

WHO has just released the latest update on global causes of death for children under age 5 for years 2000-2017. These are available for download on the WHO website at  https://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates/en/index2.html and also in the Global Health Observatory at http://www.who.int/gho.  … Continue reading →

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Seven WHO staff named in world’s most highly cited list

Posted on December 5, 2018 by colinmathers

Seven staff from the World Health Organization have been included in the 2018 Clarivate Analytics 2018 Highly Cited Researchers List. This list includes more than 4,000 leading researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences from around the … Continue reading →

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NEW PROJECTIONS OF MORTALITY AND CAUSES OF DEATH TO YEAR 2060

Posted on November 14, 2018 by colinmathers

Back in 2006, I published a paper in PLoS Medicine with detailed projections of deaths by age, sex and cause for all regions of the world, from year 2002 to 2030 (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030442).  That paper has proved very popular, with over … Continue reading →

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Noncommunicable disease mortality in tropical countries

Posted on July 31, 2018 by colinmathers

The recent WHO update of causes of death for 186 countries in 2016 (www.who.int/evidence/bod) has been used as the basis for an assessment of the importance of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in tropical countries. The paper “Acting on non-communicable diseases in … Continue reading →

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Latest information on the state of the world’s health released by WHO

Posted on June 17, 2018 by colinmathers

In mid-May, WHO released World Health Statistics 2018: Monitoring health for the SDGs  (WHS2018). This WHO flagship publication compiles data from the organization’s 194 Member States on 36 health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators, providing a snapshot of both gains … Continue reading →

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