![]() If we know what the biggest killers are, we can make sure our efforts to save lives are aimed at the right things. The idea behind Chris’s work is simple: We can’t cure what we don’t understand. (It turns out that in some countries the male/female gap is more than 5 to 1, while in others it is more like 1 to 1.) Recently Melinda and I were trying to understand suicide rates in different countries-and how they differ among men and women-and we quickly found the information we were looking for. There are more than a billion entries in the database, covering several hundred causes of death and disease. It takes a while to get good at finding your way around the tools, but once you do, they are amazingly informative. I visit the GBD data visualizations a few times each month. As Smith says, it is “the story of a huge independent effort, years in preparation, to do nothing less than chart everything that threatens the health of everyone on Earth, and make that information publicly available to doctors, health officials, political leaders, and private citizens everywhere.” It’s a highly readable account for anyone who wants to know more about Chris’s work and why it matters. Seven Billion Patients, which came out earlier this year. They also built some very cool data visualizations with the information and analysis from the GBD.Ĭhris’s story is told well in Jeremy Smith’s book Epic Measures: One Doctor. A few years later, Chris and his team launched the project he had been dreaming of: a comprehensive update of the Global Burden of Disease, or GBD, using data from researchers around the world. And it became clear that Chris-a compassionate scientist with a love for hard data and software-was the right person to take it on.Ĭhris went on to spend a few years on the faculty at Harvard University when he left in 2007, I jumped at the chance to help bring him to the University of Washington, where he set up the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But I thought that if he could pull it off, it would be a fantastic tool for everyone who cares about these issues. It was obviously a big challenge, both scientifically and politically. ![]() Yet, if you look at global health, that was where the world was-huge ignorance about what people died from.”Ĭhris told me he wanted to create a comprehensive database that would answer those questions, and make it available free online. ![]() He meant, What are the biggest causes of death and disability? How does HIV compare with strokes or road injuries or suicide or back injuries? How do the answers change over time and in different countries?Īs Chris would explain a few years later: “Nobody would imagine starting out on a long journey without knowing where they're going and what route they would take. He wanted to understand: Why do people get sick and die? I was in town for some meetings at the WHO and heard from Chris about a project he was working on. It was in the early 2000s, and Chris was working at the World Health Organization in Geneva. The first time I met Chris Murray, he was wrestling with a big question.
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