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EmailTEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Questions
- Mortality from diabetes and AIDS
- Epidemiological transition
- Cancer incidence & prevalence
- Maternal mortality
- Causes of child death in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Violent conflict and health
- Extreme poverty
- Primary school attendance
- U.S. infant mortality rates
- U.S. asthma rates
- Infectious disease control
- Primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare
- Health expenditures and health outcomes
- Socioeconomic status & health
- Equity or equality in access
This exercise is a series of questions to test your knowledge of public helath—to challenge your assumptions. Some of the questions are true/false, some are mulitple choice, and some are essay. In this case, we ask you to consider your essay answer, but we wrote the essay, which you can read by clicking the "answer" button. Going through all the questions will take a while, but remember, this test is not graded. You may come and go as you please, so please do. We invite you to challenge your assumptions on the health of the world.
1. Which disease is currently estimated to cause more deaths each year, diabetes or AIDS?
Answer:
Data source: WHO Disease and injury regional estimates for 2004 (deaths)
and IDF Diabetes Atlas.
AIDS:
AVERT estimates deaths from AIDS in 2008 at 2.0 million (range: 1.7-2.4 million).
The WHO estimates that in 2004, 31.4 million people were living with HIV. UNAIDS estimates that 33.4 million (range: 31.1-35.8 million) were living with HIV in 2008, with 2.0 million deaths—72% of which were in sub-Saharan Africa. UNAIDS puts new infections in 2008 at approximately 2.7 million (range 2.4-3.0 million).
DIABETES:
Diabetes is not just a problem of the affluent world.
In 2010, WHO estimated that 3.2 million deaths per year were attributable to complications of diabetes, or six deaths every minute. International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimates are similar (3.96 million). The WHO estimate for diabetes prevalence worldwide in 2004 is 220.5 million.
Data source IDF Diabetes Atlas.
For IDF diabetes mortality estimates by country, region, age and gender, click here.
For more on diabetes’ presence in poorer regions, see Hossain et al., “Obesity and Diabetes in the Developing World — A Growing Challenge”, New England Journal of Medicine 356.3 (18 January 2007): 213-215.
