Spreadsheet 1: The World Medicines Situation 2011 - Global Health Trends: Global Burden of Disease and Pharmaceutical Needs

This workbook contains summary DALY estimates for the year 2004. These estimates are based on the results of the WHO Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study for 2004 (1). DALY estimates are based on analysis of latest available national information on levels of mortality and cause distributions as at the end of 2007 together with latest available information from WHO programs for 35 causes of public health importance,and regional information on incidence and prevalence of diseases, injuries and their disabling sequelae. Data, methods and cause categories are described elsewhere (1,2). The GBD 2004 uses the 2006 revision of the 2004 population estimates for WHO Member States prepared by the UN Population Division (3).

For the standard DALY estimates in this workbook, 3% time discounting and non-uniform age weights were used, consistent with earlier burden of disease estimates released by WHO. Using discounting and age weights, a death in infancy corresponds to 33 DALYs, and deaths at ages 5–20 years to around 36 DALYs (4).

Note that differences between the 2004 estimates and estimates for earlier years previously published by WHO should not be interpreted as representing time trends. Estimates for earlier years are not generally comparable with those for 2004 due to changes in methods and data.

This spreadsheet includes point estimates for DALYs by region, cause, age and sex in 2004. Depending on the available data sources for each region, the cause-specific estimates will have quite substantial uncertainty ranges. Explicit uncertainty ranges are not included here, but in general would be similar to those estimated for earlier versions of the GBD (4). The number of significant figures displayed in worksheet cells in this Excel workbook do not provide information on uncertainty ranges of estimates.

The preparation of these statistics was undertaken by the WHO Department of Health Statistics and Informatics in collaboration with WHO technical programs. Documentation and GBD regional-level summary tables are available on the WHO website (http://www.who.int/evidence/bod). For other queries, please send an email to whosis@who.int.