Health Statistics

Analysis: Health by numbers: A statistician's challenge

Monday, May 14, 2012

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - The next time a headline tells of a sharp fall in measles deaths around the world, or an increase in those on treatment for HIV, or the shifting of the burden of cancer, spare a thought for the number-crunchers behind such far-reaching data.

Above all else, analyzing the state of the world's health - be it by looking at obesity rates, cancer cases, malaria deaths, or HIV-free births - requires decent statistics.

Billions of dollars are allocated and whole policy shifts made on the basis of figures from United Nations agencies like the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF or the World Bank.

Yet good data are hard to find, as the WHO's statistical analysis team knows. And extrapolating meaningful global figures from sparse raw material can be fraught with danger.

In an interview with Reuters ahead of this week's World Health Statistics report, Ties Boerma, WHO's director of health statistics and information systems, started with a little known but alarming fact: "Two thirds of deaths in the world are not registered. And a third of births are also not registered."/.../