Abstract
In the Less Developed Countries (LDC) the information on illness that is secured about the population is usually provided by the individuals themselves or their caregivers. The information on death is usually provided by caregivers in verbal autopsies, that is, interviews with caregivers or relatives who are familiar with the circumstances or conditions that led to the death of the decedent. This method has been employed widely in the LDC, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, to secure information on the cause of death, particularly the deaths of children (Snow et al. 1992; Oosterbaan 1995). Verbal autopsies are useful for securing cause-of-death data where vital registration systems are lacking and where, as in sub-Saharan Africa, most deaths occur outside of a hospital or clinic (Snow and Marsh1992).
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Notes
- 1.
1This section on sources of data for Less Developed Countries supplements the discussion of general sources in Chap. 2 and the discussion of special sources on reproductive health in Chap. 9.
- 2.
See Chap. 8 for a further discussion of the DALY as a measure of the burden of disease, including the method of computation.
- 3.
As will be evident in several tables, we can often derive an approximate but informative picture of the health situation in the less developed regions or the low and middle income regions from estimates for the world as a whole because these regions compose over four-fifths of the world’s population and many leading health conditions are concentrated in these areas.
- 4.
AIDS does not appear as a leading cause of death or a leading cause of the burden of disease in the 1990 list of the GBD study. It does appear in the 2002 WHO list and the 2020 and 2030 lists of causes as projected.
- 5.
- 6.
The United Nations prepared a “No-AIDS” scenario as part of its report on 2006 World Population Prospects (United Nations 2007). The No-AIDS scenario is the medium projection variant modified to include the additional deaths in the population total that result when the mortality rates of uninfected individuals are applied to the entire population, including the affected individuals.
- 7.
Cause-of-death data were collected at the Navrongo Health Research Center through the Navrongo Demographic Surveillance System. The data are for 1995 and are restricted to the rural segment of the population. All deaths were followed up with verbal autopsies to determine the cause of death. Three physicians coded the records independently and, when at least two of them agreed on a particular cause for a death, that cause was assigned as the most probable cause. A large share of the deaths, over one-third, were classified as of unknown cause.
- 8.
8Disability is defined here as a disease or injury, following the usage of the Global Burden of Disease studies, not as in any of the other technical senses used in other parts of this book.
- 9.
U.S. health officials and South Asian health officers are conducting trials on an avian-flu vaccine in order to be prepared for the further spread of the disease and the possible outbreak of an epidemic. There are serious concerns, however, about the capacity of the pharmaceutical manufacturing system to produce sufficient supplies of any vaccine developed if there is a world wide pandemic.
- 10.
United Nations, Administrative Committee on Coordination, Standing Committee on Nutrition (UN/ACC/SCN), Geneva, Switzerland, is composed of a number of UN member agencies (including UN, FAO, UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO, WFP, UNHCR, and UNAIDS), the World Bank, bilateral donor agencies, and other NGOs. Its function is to raise awareness of nutrition problems, mobilize commitment to solve them, increase the scale of efforts to reduce malnutrition, and promote cooperation among UN agencies and partner organizations in support of national efforts to end malnutrition. The Health Metrics Network (HMN) is a global partnership comprised of countries, multilateral and bilateral development agencies, foundations, global health initiatives, and technical experts, with the goal of increasing the availability and use of timely, reliable health information by catalyzing the funding and development of core health information systems in developing countries. In this way the partnership works to improve decision-making in public health through better health information. Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions (SMART) is a global effort to coordinate the assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of the interventions of the organizations providing humanitarian assistance. USAID and the Department of State are spearheading this effort, which is seeking to establish a consensus on a methodology for assessing the mortality and nutritional status of populations in crisis. SMART plans to pilot a program to routinely collect, analyze, and disseminate information on the nutrition and mortality experience of the populations served by humanitarian organizations.
- 11.
Hunger is not commonly used in the formal measurement of the consequences of famine. It is the psychological response to the physiological condition of nutritional deficiency. It is often used as an informal substitute for undernutrition, however. The word is no longer used to describe the official extent of food insecurity in the United States by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- 12.
The Cormic index corrects the BMI by a factor derived from a linear regression model. For an illustration of its use, see UN/ACC/SCN (2000).
- 13.
13The Beattie classification of famine edema is a scale of the severity of edema from 0 to 5. Grade 0 represents the absence of edema, grade 1 minimal edema on the foot or ankle that is not obvious, grade 2 obvious edema on the foot or ankle, grade 3 edema demonstrable up to the knee, grade 4 edema demonstrable up to the inguinal ligament, and grade 5 total body edema.
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Siegel, J.S. (2012). Special Health Issues in Less Developed Countries. In: The Demography and Epidemiology of Human Health and Aging. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1315-4_11
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