Turning neglected tropical diseases into forgotten maladies.

Because they afflict mostly poor people in poor countries, killing relatively few compared to the many who suffer from severe chronic disabilities, a large cluster of infections deserve the label of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). That is changing as these diseases' enormous health, educational, and economic toll is better understood, including how they interact with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other illnesses. Several NTDs could be controlled or even eliminated within a decade, using integrated, highly cost-effective mass drug administration programs together with nondrug interventions. Research is needed to provide additional means of control for these conditions and make elimination feasible for still others.

The dethronement of income as a cause of health: an essay / O destronamento da renda como causa da saúde: um ensaio

Income, whether of nations, groups or individuals, appears in many analyses to have a strong relation to health status and even to be the principal explanatory variable for health differences. Poor people tend to be sicker than average, and sick people tend also to be poorer than average. Of course, income is needed to buy the goods and services that contribute to protecting and improving health, but its importance has been overstated. Cross-sectional relations that ignore history exaggerate how much income matters for health. Income is dethroned as the king of explanations by four lines of evidence: (1) distribution matters more than totals or averages, and the distribution of financial protection through insurance, rather than the distribution of income, is particularly crucial; (2) historically, income growth by itself contributed little to health improvements; (3) it matters more, how rapidly and thoroughly people and nations adopt sound health interventions; and (4) some recent changes in lifestyle (diet and physical activity) that accompany income growth actually worsen health. These causes are especially relevant for infant and child health, somewhat less so for maternal health. The less important income is, the easier it is to improve health; so it is good news that countries and people need to escape from poverty, but they don't have to be rich to be healthy.

Renda, tanto de nações, grupos ou indivíduos, aparece em muitas análises como fortemente relacionada ao estado de saúde, além de ser a variável explanatória principal para a análise das diferenças em saúde. Pessoas pobres tendem a ser mais doentes que a média e pessoas doentes tendem a ser mais pobres do que a média. Certamente a renda é necessária para a compra de bens e serviços que contribuem para a promoção e melhoria da saúde, porém sua importância tem sido exagerada. Análises transversais que ignoram a história comentam exageros no quanto a renda é importante para a saúde. A renda é destronada como rainha das explicações em quatro linhas de evidências: (1) a distribuição da renda importa mais do que os totais ou médias e a distribuição da proteção financeira por meio da seguridade, melhor que a distribuição da renda, é particularmente crucial; (2) historicamente, o crescimento da própria renda contribui pouco para melhorias na saúde; (3) importa mais quão rápida e completamente populações e nações adotam intervenções de saúde adequadas e (4) algumas mudanças recentes do estilo de vida (dieta e atividade física) que acompanham o crescimento da renda realmente agravam a saúde. Essas causas são especialmente relevantes para a saúde infantil e da criança um pouco menos para a saúde materna. Quanto menos importante a renda é, mais fácil será a melhoria das condições de saúde. É uma boa notícia saber que países e povos necessitam fugir da pobreza, mas não necessitam ser ricos para serem saudáveis.

Protecting households from catastrophic health spending.

Many countries rely heavily on patients' out-of-pocket payments to providers to finance their health care systems. This prevents some people from seeking care and results in financial catastrophe and impoverishment for others who do obtain care. Surveys in eighty-nine countries covering 89 percent of the world's population suggest that 150 million people globally suffer financial catastrophe annually because they pay for health services. Prepayment mechanisms protect people from financial catastrophe, but there is no strong evidence that social health insurance systems offer better or worse protection than tax-based systems do.

Advancement of global health: key messages from the Disease Control Priorities Project.

The Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP), a joint project of the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health, the WHO, and The World Bank, was launched in 2001 to identify policy changes and intervention strategies for the health problems of low-income and middle-income countries. Nearly 500 experts worldwide compiled and reviewed the scientific research on a broad range of diseases and conditions, the results of which are published this week. A major product of DCPP, Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition (DCP2), focuses on the assessment of the cost-effectiveness of health-improving strategies (or interventions) for the conditions responsible for the greatest burden of disease. DCP2 also examines crosscutting issues crucial to the delivery of quality health services, including the organisation, financial support, and capacity of health systems. Here, we summarise the key messages of the project.

The perils of adding up: a cautionary tale about modeling and regression analysis.

To turn incomplete or imperfectly reliable information into estimates useful for policy, some modeling is often necessary or helpful. It does not follow that every statistical relation constitutes a model. There has to be an underlying theory, and the numerical estimates must respect any definitional or accounting identities that constrain the results. Ad hoc relations that do not meet these criteria can lead to uninterpretable or meaningless values, especially when different partial values, separately estimated, are added together. The imputed values of "responsiveness" in the WHO World Health Report 2000 illustrate this danger.

Malnutrition and dietary protein: evidence from China and from international comparisons.

Malnutrition, as measured by anthropometric status, is a powerful risk factor for illness and elevated death rates throughout life. Understanding the relative importance of disease, dietary quantity, and dietary quality in causing malnutrition is therefore of major importance in the design of public policy. This paper contributes to the understanding of the relative importance of quantity and quality of diet by utilizing aggregate data to complement previously reported individual-level studies. Three compilations of anthropometric data--one involving subjects from 13 provinces in China, another involving subjects from 64 counties in China, and a third involving 41 populations in 40 countries--are used to examine the relative importance for human growth of inadequacies of dietary energy and protein. The analysis involves regressing average adult heights and weights against estimates of average energy and protein availability (by province, county, or country) and per capita incomes. We use protein availability in part as a marker for overall quality of the diet, while recognizing that protein is far from perfectly correlated with dietary fat or micronutrient availability. The paper discusses issues of both data quality and statistical methodology, and points to relevant resulting caveats to our conclusions. Subject to these limitations, all three analyses suggest that, at the levels of dietary intake in these populations, lower protein intake is related to growth failure whereas lower levels of energy availability are not. The protein effect appears stronger for males than for females.

Basic patterns in national health expenditure

This paper analyses national health accounts estimates for 191 World Health Organization Member States for 1997, using simple comparisons and linear regressions to describe spending on health and how it is financed. The data cover all sources—out-of-pocket spending, social insurance contributions, financing from government general revenues and voluntary and employment-related private insurance — classified according to their completeness and reliability. (Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2002;80:134-142.)(Au)

Basic patterns in national health expenditure.

Analysed in this paper are national health accounts estimates for 191 WHO Member States for 1997, using simple comparisons and linear regressions to describe spending on health and how it is financed. The data cover all sources - out-of-pocket spending, social insurance contributions, financing from government general revenues and voluntary and employment-related private insurance - classified according to their completeness and reliability. Total health spending rises from around 2-3% of gross domestic product (GDP) at low incomes (< 1000 US dollars per capita) to typically 8-9% at high incomes (> 7000 US dollars). Surprisingly, there is as much relative variation in the share for poor countries as for rich ones, and even more relative variation in amounts in US dollars. Poor countries and poor people that most need protection from financial catastrophe are the least protected by any form of prepayment or risk-sharing. At low incomes, out-of-pocket spending is high on average and varies from 20-80% of the total; at high incomes that share drops sharply and the variation narrows. Absolute out-of-pocket expenditure nonetheless increases with income. Public financing increases faster, and as a share of GDP, and converges at high incomes. Health takes an increasing share of total public expenditure as income rises, from 5-6% to around 10%. This is arguably the opposite of the relation between total health needs and need for public spending, for any given combination of services. Within public spending, there is no convergence in the type of finance - general revenue versus social insurance. Private insurance is usually insignificant except in some rich countries.