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Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project quantifies the impact of different health conditions by combining information about morbidity and premature mortality within a single metric, the Disability Adjusted Life Year. One important goal for the GBD project has been to inform decisions about global...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Voigt, Kristin, King, Nicholas B
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5927004/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29731809
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phx012
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author Voigt, Kristin
King, Nicholas B
author_facet Voigt, Kristin
King, Nicholas B
author_sort Voigt, Kristin
collection PubMed
description The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project quantifies the impact of different health conditions by combining information about morbidity and premature mortality within a single metric, the Disability Adjusted Life Year. One important goal for the GBD project has been to inform decisions about global health priorities. A number of recent studies have used GBD data to argue that global health funding fails to align with the GBD. We argue that these studies’ shared assumption that global health resources should ‘align’ with the burden of disease is unfounded and has troubling implications. First, since the allocation of resources involves difficult trade-offs between different, potentially competing goals, any ‘misalignment’ of allocation and disease burdens need not necessarily indicate that the allocation of funds fails to meet recipient countries’ needs or interests. Second, using alignment as a baseline implicitly makes controversial assumptions about how harms of different magnitudes affecting different numbers of individuals should be aggregated. We discuss two alternative ways in which GBD data could help inform decisions about resource allocation, neither of which gives more than a limited role to GBD data.
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spelling pubmed-59270042018-05-04 Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid Voigt, Kristin King, Nicholas B Public Health Ethics Original Articles The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project quantifies the impact of different health conditions by combining information about morbidity and premature mortality within a single metric, the Disability Adjusted Life Year. One important goal for the GBD project has been to inform decisions about global health priorities. A number of recent studies have used GBD data to argue that global health funding fails to align with the GBD. We argue that these studies’ shared assumption that global health resources should ‘align’ with the burden of disease is unfounded and has troubling implications. First, since the allocation of resources involves difficult trade-offs between different, potentially competing goals, any ‘misalignment’ of allocation and disease burdens need not necessarily indicate that the allocation of funds fails to meet recipient countries’ needs or interests. Second, using alignment as a baseline implicitly makes controversial assumptions about how harms of different magnitudes affecting different numbers of individuals should be aggregated. We discuss two alternative ways in which GBD data could help inform decisions about resource allocation, neither of which gives more than a limited role to GBD data. Oxford University Press 2017-11 2017-08-11 /pmc/articles/PMC5927004/ /pubmed/29731809 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phx012 Text en © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
spellingShingle Original Articles
Voigt, Kristin
King, Nicholas B
Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title_full Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title_fullStr Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title_full_unstemmed Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title_short Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid
title_sort out of alignment? limitations of the global burden of disease in assessing the allocation of global health aid
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5927004/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29731809
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/phe/phx012
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