Global Health Policy

Saving kids: Who doesn’t want to do that? Though relatively uncontroversial (say, compared to saving drug addicts and sex workers), the agenda for child survival is not new. In fact, it’s a (relatively) old agenda in global health, arguably dating back to the time of UNICEF's third Executive Director James Grant (1980-1995) who pushed to recognize the “global silent emergency” and to reduce preventable child deaths.

At the end of the month, the last senior demographer at the World Bank will leave on retirement, cementing the erosion of the Bank’s technical cutting edge in demography and stirring the question:  How will the World Bank understand key development challenges without demographic expertise in-house?  And without this knowledge, how will the Bank advise its client countries effectively?

A few days ago the World Health Statistics 2012 Report released its annual compendium of statistics. No doubt, it was a lot of work to compile—to verify every number in every cell, for each country and indicator. The WHO should be commended for providing this invaluable global public good. A sincere request: the Report would be more user-friendly and useful if the Report came with spreadsheets in downloadable tables (much like the World Malaria Report), and if the Report’s tables were consistent with their main database, the Global Health Observatory (GHO). For example, the coverage measures of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) which were included in the Report are absent from the GHO, as far as we can tell. (On an unrelated note, we did notice that the GHO recently added hand-washing as an indicator, perhaps in response to a recent blog—kudos to WHO!)

[Update, June 29, 2012. The authors of the study here blogged have retracted it. The issue they refer to in the retraction is one I raise toward the end of this post, where I write, "It appears to me that the estimator does not include fixed effects, but merely clusters standard errors by country."]