Priorities in Health

Excerpt

Delivering efficacious and inexpensive health interventions leads to dramatic reductions in mortality and disability at modest cost. Globalization has been diffusing the knowledge about what these interventions are and how to deliver them. The pace of this diffusion into a country—more than its level of income—determines the tempo of health improvement in that country.

Priorities in Health aims to speed the diffusion of life-saving knowledge.

This companion volume to Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition (DCP2) facilitates access to DCP2, synthesizes many of the book's major themes and findings, and helps readers identify chapters of greatest interest to them. With this guide, policy makers, practitioners, academics, and the members of the interested public will learn about DCP2's main messages, gain an understanding of its principal methods of analysis, appreciate the scope of major diseases, and be alerted to the most cost-effective interventions.

These two books, as well as the Global Burden of Disease and Risk Factors , are the result of the work of the Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP), initiated in 2002 by the Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and, more recently, the Population Reference Bureau. The project was largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. DCPP's purpose is to review, generate, and disseminate population health information for use by low- and middle-income countries and national and international organizations as they develop and refine their own health priorities to decrease disease burdens locally and globally.