Global comparative assessments in the health sector: Disease burden expenditures and intervention packages

BOOK REVIEW LIVRO^*

MURRAY, C.J.L. & LOPEZ, A.D. ed. - Global comparative assessments in the health sector. Disease burden expenditures and intervention packages. Collected reprints from the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Geneva, World Health Organization, 1994. viii, 196p. (available in English; Spanish in preparation). ISBN: 92 4 156175 0.

The eight articles collected in this volume show how a new way of assessing the world health situation can be used to generate health data unprecedented in their completeness, comparability, and objectivity. Already recognized as capable of revolutionizing the processes of priority setting and resource allocation in the health sector, the approach was first used to develop the empirical basis for the World development report 1993: Investing in health. Nearly 100 disease experts collaborated in this project.

The book, which has two parts, discusses the methods, findings, and implications of the first comprehensive assessment of the global burden of disease, of the financial resources available of the health sector in every country, and of the options for cost-effective interventions.

Articles in part one describe the concept, applications, and results of the use of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for measuring the global burden of disease. The lived with a disability and the time indicator, which measures the time lost due to premature mortality, has been used to estimate the burden of disease due to more than 100 causes, for five age groups, by sex, throughout the world. Detailed information is given on the technical basis of DALYs, global and regional cause-of-death patterns, methods for quatifying the health consequences of disabilities, and the main findings and implications of the global burden of disease approach.

Articles in part two provide comparative assessments of financial resources available to the health sector and the range of interventions that can be purchased with these resources. In a key achievement, these assessments allow identification of a minimum package of essential public health and clinical interventions, which are highly cost-effective and capable of reducing the disease burden in low-income developing coutries by about 25% at a cost of US$ 12 per person per year.

Contents

Part one: Global burden of disease

Quantifying the burden of disease: the technical basis for disability-adjusted life years (C.J.L. Murray)

Global and regional cause-of-death patterns in 1990 (C.J.L. Murray and A.D. Lopez)

Quantifying disability: data, methods and results (C.J.L. Murray and A.D. Lopez)

The global burden of disease in 1990: summary results, sensibility analysis and future directions (C.J.L. Murray, A.D. Lopez and D.T. Jamison)

Part two: Health expenditures and intervention packages: a global overview

National health expenditures: a global analysis (C.J.L. Murray, R. Govindaraj and P. Musgrove)

External assistance to the health sector in developing countries: a detailed analysis, 1972-90 (C. Michaud and C.J.L. Murray)

Design, content and financing of an essential national package of health services (J.L. Bobadilla, P. Cowley, P. Musgrove and H. Saxenian)

Cost-effectiveness analysis and policy choices: investing in health systems (C.J.L. Murray, J. Kreuser and W. Whang)

About the editors

Christopher Murray is Associate Professor of International Health Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA. A physician and health economist, he has worked extensively on tuberculosis, cost effectiveness, and health status assessment. He is currently Chairman of the WHO Tuberculosis Operational Research Steering Committee.

Alan Lopez is a scientist in the Programme on Substance Abuse at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. A specialist in medical statistics and epidemiology, he has worked at WHO for over ten years on the analysis of mortality data and, more recently, on the quantification of the global tobacco epidemic.

World Health Organization

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Este livro encontra-se na Biblioteca do Instituto Tropical de São Paulo.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Sept 2006
• Date of issue
  Aug 1995