The Cost of War on Public Health: An Exploratory Method for Understanding the Impact of Conflict on Public Health in Sri Lanka

PURPOSE: The direct impact of protracted conflict on population health and development is well understood. However, the extent of a war's impact on long-term health, and the opportunity costs, are less well understood. This research sought to overcome this gap by asking whether or not health outcomes in Sri Lanka would have been better in the absence of a 26-year war than they were in the presence of war. METHODS: A counterfactual model of national and district-level health outcomes was created for Sri Lanka for the period 1982 to 2002. At the national level, the model examined life expectancy, infant mortality rate (IMR), and maternal mortality ratios (MMR). At the district level, it looked at IMR and MMR. The model compared outcomes generated by the counterfactual model to actual obtained health outcomes. It looked at the rate of change and absolute values. RESULTS: The analysis demonstrated that war altered both rate of change and absolute health outcomes for the worse. The impact was most clearly evident at the district level. IMR was poorer than predicted in 10 districts; of these 8 were outside of the conflict zone. The MMR was worse than expected in 11 districts of which 9 were not in the conflict zone. Additionally, the rate of improvement in IMR slowed as a result of war in 16 districts whereas the rate of improvement in MMR slowed in 9. CONCLUSION: This project showed that protracted conflict degraded the trajectory of public health in Sri Lanka and hurt population health outside of the conflict zone. It further provided a novel methodology with which to better understand the indirect impact of conflict on population health by comparing what is to what could have been achieved in the absence of war. In so doing, this research responded to two public health challenges by providing a tool through which to better understand the human and opportunity costs of war and by answering a call for new methodologies.