IHME’s Global Health Insights

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Science
  • Semimonthly

Dive into the latest trending topics in global health with IHME’s Global Health Insights podcast. Our health researchers explain the significance of new studies, share data related to current events, and help you understand the story behind the numbers.

  1. Oct 15

    Advancing childhood cancer care in Ghana

    Dr. Emmanuella Amoako, a pediatric oncologist at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital in Ghana, is the winner of the 2026 Roux Prize. We talk with her about how she has used evidence to improve early diagnosis, expand access to treatment, and strengthen locally led cancer research, including a shared-care service that brings treatment closer to families and a program that trains parents to help detect childhood cancer early. Learn more about Dr. Amoako's work: https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/videos/roux-prize-2026-recipient-dr-emmanuella-amoako Nominations for the 2027 Roux Prize are open on November 1: https://www.healthdata.org/about/awards/roux-prize __________________ Transcript Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart.   In this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Emmanuella Amoako, winner of the 2026 Roux Prize. Known affectionately to her patients as Dr. Ella, she’s a pediatric oncologist advancing childhood cancer care in Ghana.   The Roux Prize, supported by David and Barbara Roux and awarded by IHME, recognizes a person who has used health evidence in bold ways to make people healthier and includes a $100,000 award.   Childhood cancer survival exceeds 80% in many high-income countries, compared with less than 30% in many African settings. As lead pediatric oncologist at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, Dr. Amoako established a shared care pediatric oncology service in 2019, bringing treatment closer to families who had traveled up to nine hours to reach specialist care. The service has since cared for more than 150 children.   Dr. Amoako also developed COMPASS, a community program that trains parents of childhood cancer survivors and primary care workers to recognize warning signs and guide families to specialized care. And through the African Cancer Atlas, she is helping build evidence that better represents African patients in cancer research.   Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Amoako. What drew you to pediatric oncology? Was there a particular moment or a particular patient that made you decide this was your life’s work?   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: Thank you very much for having me. Pediatric oncology, I always – whenever I’m asked this question, I always laugh because it was like the last thing on my list when I became a pediatrician. I always used to think I would do something related to maybe procedures or just genetics. I always wanted to do genetics.   And then I quite remember as a resident rotating through the pediatric oncology rotation, I sat once with a senior colleague of mine, Dr. Nihad Salifu, and she was asking me like what my future plans were. And then I looked at her and I’m like well, it’s not going to be oncology. I want to do something I want, like genetics. And then she looked at me like very seriously and said yeah, if you do genetics, just like clinical genetics here in Ghana, what are you going to use it for? I’m like, well, I’ll make the diagnosis – like then what?   Then what? And I’m like okay, I do not know. And she’s like, well, cancer genetics is emerging. If you really want to do something in genetics, you should consider it. Go read on it and then let me know what your thoughts are. I mean the next obvious thing I said was, yeah, you just want me to do it because it has oncology in it, and she said, no, no, really, just go think about it.   So that sat with me for a bit. And then when I completed my residency and went back to the station where I was to practice as a general pediatrician – so I started in September 2019 and then in November 2019, this child comes in to us at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. So a 14-year-old boy, he had lymphoma – he was very sick, and he had one of the side effects that comes with that particular cancer, which is the cells break down quite quickly, we call it tumor lysis syndrome. When the cells break down, there’s this overload on the kidneys, so he was in acute kidney failure. He was very ill.   Now at the time in Cape Coast, what we always did was we would see the child and when we suspected cancer we referred to Accra. So just for context, Accra to Cape Coast is about a four-hour drive. And so we had to put this child in an ambulance to move to Accra. But I picked up the phone, I called the person who trained me in Accra and I called her, Prof. Lorna Renner. And I’m like, Prof., I have this child who is very sick. I need to move them. Do you have a bed? Do you have space?   And she just is like, Ella, from what you’re describing, you know this child is not going to be able to travel, right? I’m like, yeah, Prof., but I cannot do anything here in Cape Coast. She’s like, well, I trained you, so you can try. I can guide you from here.   And I’m like, Prof., I don’t think I want to get my hands dirty. And she’s like, well, I believe you can do something. It’s two things: He’s not going to make the trip. He would probably die before getting to care, so you need to do something.   And so thankfully, Cape Coast is very close like the, what do you call them? The units are very closely knit. So I call the dialysis unit. The were willing to hemodialyze the child. I called – at that time the service that was provided there was for adult cancer, so I called the pharmacist. They were able to prepare some chemo. And so we would give chemo, would dialyze. We would give some chemo, would dialyze. And he lived. He actually lived. Yeah.   And I remember when we were out of the woods, I called Prof. Renner. I’m like, Prof., I’m going to send him now his stable. She’s like, you’ve done the hard part. You can do whatever is left. I’m not taking this patient. Okay?   So I’m like, wow. Okay. So she sent the protocols. And it was not just me – there was a team that was there that was willing, and we worked with him, and it was quite timely, I must say.   So subsequently, every child that came that was not even very ill, she’s like, well, you can do it. I’m not gonna take this patient.   It was quite timely because then 2020 COVID hits, and mind you, Cape Coast serves three different regions and one of the farthest regions would be like nine hours from Accra, the center. And most of the patients came from there.   So then it was like, well, we would have to start treating children in Cape Coast. And so that piqued my interest in pediatric oncology, and I had to go and get formal training. So 2019, 2020, I didn’t have formal training in pediatric oncology but I was treating the patients, and then 2021 I had to go get formal training.   Rhonda Stewart: That’s incredible. So it sounds like your mentor really changed your career by pushing you to think about then what. So you were going to do genetics, but then what? And just to keep going.   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: Yeah.   Rhonda Stewart: Then to give you the confidence, to push you, to say that you could treat this child locally, which then made it possible for you to treat other children locally. That’s incredible.   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: Yeah. And I must say that it’s been amazing being in this field.   Rhonda Stewart: Wow, that’s fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about the survival gap. In many high-income countries, more than 80% of children with cancer survive, but in many African settings, unfortunately, fewer than 30% do. What drives that gap, and what part of that gap can be closed by having better evidence?   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: Yeah, sad, these statistics. I mean, I think it’s always daunting when you hear it and to think, actually, it’s quite interesting because 80% survive in high-income countries, less than 30% in low- and middle-income countries.   However, the burden of disease, 80% of the cases are actually found in low- and middle-income countries. And only 20% of those cases are found in high-income countries. So it’s quite a very weird balance. But yeah, there’s a lot of data evidence to suggest that people present late to clinical settings, people abandon treatment, there’s a lot of toxic death. And for me, most important is the kind of protocols that we used are all adapted from clinical trials that were conducted in people that were not or are not of African descent.   Rhonda Stewart: Right.   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: I mean, it is well known that clinical trials really across the world have only about 2% of people of African descent. Not to talk about clinical trials in Africa, and then in children in Africa, which barely exist.   So again, if these clinical trials are not happening in a certain population, but then the protocols are adapted to them, would it really work? So then I’ve always asked the question, is it that we have more aggressive disease, or the protocols are just not working?   Again, when it comes to genetics and genomics, it’s not been fully studied in people of African descent. Only about 2% to 3% of the global genome data bank consists of people of African descent. So we really do not understand the genetic basis of the cancers that we do see in our children.   Rhonda Stewart: You mentioned Cape Coast with the example of your 14-year-old patient. And with respect to shared care at Cape Coast, before 2019, as you mentioned, families sometimes had to travel up to nine hours to reach specialists. Tell us how you designed that shared care service and what’s changed for the children who’ve been treated – and it’s more than 150 children at this point.   Dr. Emmanuela Amoako: Yeah. So again, that initial conversation with Prof. Renner, like, you know what, I would guide and you can treat, I’ll send you the protocols, I’ll make sure I guide you, was what gave the whole idea of the shared care center.   And so what we started with was to treat critically ill patient

  2. Oct 12

    Global threats to health in the 21st century

    Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of IHME and co-chair of the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, discusses the threats most likely to shape human health through 2100. We talk with him about why obesity and low educational attainment carry such large burdens, why sub-Saharan Africa bears a disproportionate share of risks created elsewhere, and what leaders outside the health sector can do now. Learn more about the Commission Read the Commission's report published in The Lancet Watch the launch event at the World Health Summit Contextualize the threats to health through the new data visualization tool ___________ Transcript Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart.   In this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Chris Murray, Director of IHME and Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health. The Commission assessed threats to health over a 75-year horizon from 2025 to 2100 and identified 17 catastrophic threats, including two with extinction potential: malicious use of AI and nuclear conflict.   Rather than focusing on worst-case scenarios, the Commission measured each threat’s amenable burden, the difference in healthy years of life between a plausible best and plausible worst future. The analysis is not a policy ranking, but demonstrates the interconnected nature of these threats.   We cover why sub-Saharan Africa bears a disproportionate share of risks, what finance ministers, business leaders, and security officials should take from the report, and how a recurring monitor could keep these threats on the agenda between crises.   Chris, tell us why this Commission, and why now? Given things like Ebola outbreaks, major geopolitical conflict, cuts to development aid, and how powerful AI has grown, why create a 75-year view of threats to health?   Dr. Christopher Murray: When we started the Commission three-plus years ago, we all had in mind three big threats. One was very long-term climate change, where in the analyses around the effects of emissions, the largest impacts of emissions actually happen in the next century. So to deal with a threat like climate change, you really need a long-term perspective to fully capture its impact.   We had conflict in Ukraine, and we had just come out of a pandemic – COVID, of course – and COVID is another example, or pandemics are another example, where a long-term view is necessary because we can’t know when the next pandemic will be. But we have increasing confidence, when you take the long-term view, that there will be another pandemic, or several of them. And so the long-term view is critical for some of the threats that we need to manage. And if you just look in the short term, you’re going to miss some of the biggest impacts that’ll be out there.   And so that was part of our motivation, trying to get the right time frame for thinking to help governments, the global community, think about these threats. And so we ended up with the 75-year view.   Rhonda Stewart: And in addition to that long-term time horizon, one of the other points made very powerfully in the analysis is the need to address these catastrophic threats simultaneously, not to focus on one at a time. Tell us why that’s so important.   Dr. Christopher Murray: I think we’ve become very familiar with single-issue groups, whether scientific or advocacy focused, that bring to bear a lot of energy and focus on one issue, let’s say conflict or climate change.   But if we just go about looking at threats one at a time, we’re going to miss the fact that there are a lot of threats that we have to manage. It’s not just two or three, it’s many. And in our case, we argue for 17 and that there are common strategies that can be used to tackle multiple threats at the same time.   And so the one-by-one strategy really can give us almost a false sense of security. If we put all of our eggs in the basket of dealing with one issue, we’ll be okay. But we have to live with the reality that there are many challenges that the global community and national governments have to face.   Rhonda Stewart: Along with the interconnected nature of the threats, the analysis also measures threats in a different way, and the Commission explores the threats by amenable burden, the gap between a plausible best and a plausible worst future. Can you break that down for us and help people understand what that means? Dr. Christopher Murray: Yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about and debating the pitfalls of forecasting, because of the 75-year time horizon, which is necessary because of some of the threats that are changing slowly and have their big impacts in the future.   You know, think climate change. We depend very much on the forecasts or the scenarios being reasonable. But we know from the history of forecasting that when your forecast can alter policy priorities, then you are in the territory that’s sometimes called reflexivity or self-defeating or self-fulfilling forecasts. Lots of names in different fields, but a well understood problem. And our solution to this was not to say we have a crystal ball and can predict how governments will respond, and this is the pathway of the future for sure, but rather that we can do a better job if we bound the range of possible futures by using empirical approaches to say what’s the plausibly worst that can happen? And plausibly best.   And it’s that zone that we can end up influencing where we land. And the difference between plausible best and worst we call amenable, or amenable burden. And the plausible part is also really key in that thinking and goes into the notion about amenable burden because we can dream up all sorts of scenarios – terrible scenarios, utopian scenarios – but we want to ground our plausible best and worst in what we’ve observed across all countries in the past 35 years or so, where we have good data.   And so we can say look, let’s take the best and the worst we’ve observed across countries and say, what if the whole world moved to that best or worst that we’ve observed? And that gives us an empirically grounded view of plausible best and worst. And that’s been the key lens through which we’ve been looking at the threats into the future.   Rhonda Stewart: The report is very clear that this is not a policy ranking when we look at the different threats. Obesity has the largest amenable burden of the 17 catastrophic threats. And that might be surprising to people that such an everyday condition might appear so high.   Dr. Christopher Murray: I want to reiterate that the main message from the Commission is not necessarily which threat has the biggest amenable burden, but rather there is this multiplicity of really profoundly large catastrophic threats.   Nevertheless, obesity is very large. It is the largest in terms of the estimated amenable burden. And the reason that we do this exercise is the surprises like obesity coming through, which is, until you run the models and map out the trajectory of the possible for the future, we don’t really know whether something that affects many, many people, like obesity, that's getting worse very steadily, will turn out to be super amenable to policy intervention or it’s going to be much smaller.   And so, having done that analysis, what we observe is there are some countries that have held the increase in obesity over the last 35 years to a relatively small amount. Nobody’s brought it down, but some have sort of kept it from going up dramatically. And then there are other places in the world where obesity has really skyrocketed and is on a trajectory of going up and up. When you look at the gap between those and look at the many, many outcomes related to obesity – cancers, heart disease, diabetes – then you end up with a really large potential to improve human health by getting us on the plausible best trajectory for the world.   Rhonda Stewart: Let’s talk about another one of the threats, which is education, and specifically, education as a health lever. So low educational attainment accounts for 16.1 billion years of life lost. More than two-thirds of that falls on sub-Saharan Africa. How does education shape health and even the size of the world’s population?   Dr. Christopher Murray: Well, one of the more robust findings from public health research, both in low-resource settings and high-resource settings, is that educational attainment is a huge driver of child mortality – so that’s the mother’s education – as well as adult mortality. And many people have studied this, and there are many published reviews of the magnitude of this.   And so education, we know, is connected to health. It’s also really strongly related to women’s fertility choices. For every year of completed schooling, it turns out that women end up choosing to have fewer children. And so that is a big driver of fertility and ultimately of world population.   Now in the Commission’s work, the second piece was those plausible trajectories, which is, does education just march along in every country in the same way, or is there a range of countries where they’ve been able to increase educational attainment much faster and others where it’s been much slower? And the answer is yes, there’s a big range.   So if we can get on the pathway of more rapid educational expansion compared to the slower educational expansion, it makes a really big difference. And interestingly, the standout performers on raising particularly girls’ education have been in the Middle East, where they’ve made, essentially over a generation, incredible increases of educational attainment for women with all sorts of benefits that have followed from that.   And then there are places where it's

  3. Oct 5

    Investing in health as a public good

    A new $540 million, 10-year investment from the Gates Foundation will support IHME’s global public goods: the Global Burden of Disease study (GBD), forecasting of future health scenarios, and tracking of financing for global health. We discuss the investment with IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray, including how GBD will expand to nearly 5,000 locations and why timely, local health evidence matters as global health funding declines. ________________________________ Transcript: Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I'm Rhonda Stewart. In this episode we'll hear from IHME director Dr. Chris Murray about a $540 million, 10-year investment from the Gates Foundation and what it means for health evidence as a global public good.  The investment will support IHME's three flagship research areas: the Global Burden of Disease Study, also known as GBD; IHME's future health scenarios forecasting platform; and its tracking of financing for global health.  Knowledge about what harms health, and what works to improve it, benefits everyone. Over the next decade, GBD will expand from about 925 locations to nearly 5,000, with estimates at the state or provincial level in every country. This more detailed view can reveal health disparities that national averages hide.  IHME's work is carried out with a network of more than 20,000 Collaborators in approximately 150 countries. IHME estimates have been cited in nearly 8,000 policy documents worldwide.  As an organization, we were recently incredibly fortunate to receive from the Gates Foundation a very significant grant to help continue our work and wanted to talk a little bit about that grant and what it's going to allow us to do. So why don't we start there?  Dr. Chris Murray: Yes, we're very excited that we received a $540 million investment, if you will, into the next 10 years of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The purpose of that very large grant is to allow us to continue producing our three flagship what we call global public goods, and that's the global burden of disease, our future health scenarios forecasting scenario building platform, and our monitoring of resources for health, finance, and global health.  So it's a great endorsement of what we've been doing over the last 20 years, and we're looking forward to the exciting directions that these new resources can allow us to go.    Rhonda Stewart: When you say that health evidence is a global public good, what does that mean and why does that matter now more than ever since the GBD was first launched in the 1990s?    Dr. Chris Murray: So public good is a term that actually comes out of economics. It's the idea, for example, that there are things where my enjoyment of something does not affect your enjoyment of it. So the classic one that, that students are taught in university or high school is a park. A park is a public good because you can enjoy the park, I can enjoy the park. It's not like eating food where the person who consumes the food means that somebody else doesn't consume the food.  In a similar way, building up knowledge and evidence about what are health problems and what works to solve those health problems is also a public good. Because if we learn that information, then one community can use that, and another community can use it, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and on and on because it's knowledge and my use of that knowledge does not decrease your ability to use that knowledge.   So that's where this language around public good comes from. And you know, it's a useful idea because the other thing that economics tells us about is that for public goods, unless somebody comes along, a government or another organization, a philanthropy, and funds public goods, everybody will tend to say, well, I'm not going to pay for that because somebody else is also going to benefit. And so I'm going to wait for the other person to pay for that public good. It's called in economics the free rider problem.  Fortunately for us, the Gates Foundation have the vision that even though so many people are going to benefit from what we do, they're willing to make this investment so that this is available for everybody and everybody can take action on the analyses that we do.    Rhonda Stewart: This is a 10-year investment. What does that decade-long horizon allow us to do that a shorter term grant might not allow us to do?    Dr. Chris Murray: This decade-long investment – and this is the third – because we've had two 10-year investments from the Gates Foundation. This is larger, but still it's been a sequence, and that's allowed us to build up this huge global movement collaboration for the global burden of disease because we can do things that will take many years to come to fruition. It allows us to recruit and retain top talent because people don't like to move around for short term projects, but they're willing to come for a longer term period. And it allows us to sort of say, hey, here are things that we can build, for example, the scenarios platform.  What are the things that work best to change the burden of disease? We can take the time to build up a resource like that that wouldn't be achievable in a three-year grant.  And so the long term horizon gives us that stability and the opportunity to innovate and build a better set of results for the world that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do    Rhonda Stewart: With respect to the global burden of disease, this investment is going to allow us to go from roughly about 925 locations in the study to nearly 5,000. Walk us through what those kinds of changes mean for people who are looking to use the information. So, what will they be able to see in the data in 2030, for example, that they can't see today?    Dr. Chris Murray: So what we've learned along the way in the now 35 years of the global burden of disease work is, initially it started out at a regional level when it was done for the World bank in 1991–93. Then it became country-specific when it was based at WHO.   And then in the last 20 years, where it's been based at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, we have been able to, for where certain countries have asked for it, we've been able to do the burden of disease analysis at the subnational level. So, the first to ask for this was actually the United Kingdom.  And so, then we did the burden of disease at local health authorities. Soon thereafter, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and Nigeria were added, as well as Norway, New Zealand, and Brazil. So it's come to the point where we have about 22 countries at the subnational level currently.  And what we have the vision and what we've learned from that is that as soon as you do subnational assessments, there is more local engagement. We get more Collaborators in those countries, more policy uptake, and all sorts of innovative ideas of how to use subnational burden. Use it for human resource planning, use it for resource allocation, using it for figuring out how to target different groups and needs.  And so there has been a long-running list of countries that would like subnational burden. And we haven't been able to meet that demand. And now we've decided as part of this new installment of funding, we will just do subnational everywhere. And so every country will do at least to state or province.  And then we will also make sure that there is no state or province, that if there's anywhere that's over a population of 10 million, we'll go to the next level. So, we're always looking at a reasonably granular view of health, which helps reveal the disparities and inequalities that exist. And that turns out to be very useful for governments.    Rhonda Stewart: You said previously that national averages can obscure disparities. Can you think of a specific example where, because we were able to go deeper and to be more granular at the subnational level, there was something that was revealed that was especially useful to decision-makers and maybe even helped them to change or take a decision?    Dr. Chris Murray: Well, you know, if we start in the United States, I think there's been a long tradition that even started as sort of a spin out of the original burden of disease work in the 90s of looking at county-level outcomes in the US, and then now more recently we have funding from the National Institutes of Health to do county intersected with race/ethnicity.   So more than 3,000 counties in the US, five race/ethnicity groups or at least that's what you can get from the data – and there's more clearly – and that's about 15,000 units of analysis. So it's very detailed. And what it reveals is that within the US, even though we have some of the best outcomes in the world, in some counties, Asian Americans have life expectancies in the mid-90s, 95, 96. So some of the highest on record in the world, if not the highest. And at the other end we have Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota with a life expectancy of 56. And so you have a 40-year range from the worst to the best.  And even if you look more generally there is a sort of, there's a quite diffuse set of places and race/ethnicity groups with life expectancies in the US that are much more similar to a low-income country than to a high-income country. And that's really useful to figure out where to target interventions, what sort of public health and medical care interventions are needed.   And this is why NIH is invested in trying to do this work because it helps on a very granular disease specific level. Say, hey, we really need to target blood pressure management over here, or we need to recognize the large disparities that exist and figure out intervention strategies appropriate to each community to make a difference    Rhonda Stewart: W

  4. Mar 11

    Delivering scientific evidence through the NUS-IHME Global Burden of Disease Research Centre

    The NUS-IHME Global Burden of Disease Research Centre is a new regional hub to serve as a key analytical engine for Southeast Asia and the surrounding region by delivering scientific evidence that its leaders can translate into policy. We discuss the Centre with IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray and Professor Chong Yap Seng, Dean of NUS Medicine, the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. __________________________________ Transcript: Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart.   In this episode, we’ll hear from IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray and Professor Chong Yap Seng, Dean of NUS Medicine, the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. They discuss an exciting new collaboration, the NUS–IHME Global Burden of Disease Research Centre.   This is a new regional hub to serve as a key analytical engine for Southeast Asia and the surrounding region by delivering scientific evidence that its leaders can translate into policy. Southeast Asian countries are home to nearly 1 in 10 people worldwide and face a variety of health challenges driven by a rapidly aging population, changing disease patterns, and the growing health impacts of climate change. Yet within the region, many lack critical data and insight that would help local leaders allocate resources more efficiently, target inequities, and operate proactively rather than reactively, particularly during an outbreak or a pandemic. The Centre will study a range of issues, including antimicrobial resistance or AMR, metabolic risks, women’s health, and dietary and lifestyle factors.   Professor Chong and Dr. Murray, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast. Let’s talk first about how the new NUS–IHME Global Burden of Disease Research Centre came about. What was the impetus for launching the Centre? And Professor Chong, let’s start with you.   Professor Chong Yap Seng: Thanks, Rhonda. I think it’s a matter of admiration, friendship, and persistence that got this Centre started. I’ve been a great fan of the Global Burden of Disease study for a long time, and the work of IHME. One of their former faculty, Associate Professor Marie Ng, joined NUS Medicine a few years ago, and in 2023 or 24, she introduced me to Stephen Lim from IHME. We got along very well, and there was great interest for us to work together because I’ve been a great fan of the Global Burden of Disease study.   And then we persisted to discuss more and more details, and in November 2024, we signed a memorandum of understanding between NUS Medicine and IHME to work on creating a joint center. And then from there it grew and gained momentum. And in February this year, we actually launched the Centre.   So as I said, because we respected the work of IHME so much, we had great friends – Marie Ng with IHME, and then meeting Stephen, and then Emmanuela [Gakidou], and then finally Chris [Murray]. And we persisted and overcame all the hurdles that came in the way, and that’s how the Centre got started.   Rhonda Stewart: Wonderful. And Dr. Murray, what would you like to add about partnering with NUS?   Dr. Christopher Murray: Well, I think this was a very exciting opportunity for us. NUS is one of the leading universities in the world. And so given Marie’s history with us and her energy and Yap Seng, the willingness to foster and catalyze this sort of collaboration, this is just great. I mean, we want to be working with the best institutions in the world. And here’s this fantastic opportunity for us to be able to work with NUS and particularly the School of Medicine. So this was really simple from our point of view.   Rhonda Stewart: And the Centre will focus on Southeast Asian countries. Let me ask you both, why is this region particularly important to study?   Professor Chong Yap Seng: Okay. From my point of view, I would say that Southeast Asia is not an area that has been well studied by many people, including the region’s own investigators. And it’s an important region that’s almost 700 million people and growing quite rapidly – so I think increasingly important in terms of population and economic activity, and also an area that’s subject to a different set of diseases than you might see in other parts of the world. So a different kind of emerging infectious diseases, issues brought on by climate change, which particularly hits this area hard. So we have quite a lot of natural disasters, and of course, more than half of the population here stay in urban centers. So we are facing all these urban issues that are happening at an incredible pace. One of the big issues affecting this part of the region is our declining fertility, declining total fertility rate. So Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore are probably some of the countries with the lowest total fertility rates. And this brings up a lot of questions, especially regarding women’s health as well. So I think it’s important to focus on this region to start to understand what the problems are so that we can deal with them with a strong base of data.   Rhonda Stewart: Dr. Murray, obviously, in the Global Burden of Disease study, that work covers regions all over the world. And so you have a perspective on the unique challenges in each region. What would you say is particularly important to study in Southeast Asia as a region?   Dr. Christopher Murray: You know, as Yap Seng said, this is a region that has had – I mean, there’s a lot of diversity within the region – but on average, incredible economic growth. It has been undergoing this very rapid epidemiological transition. It still has a number of diseases like dengue, let’s say, that we don’t have much in other regions, or much less.   But the shift from the pattern dominated by communicable, maternal, and neonatal causes toward the non-communicable diseases is very rapid. I think that puts a lot of stress on health systems in the region, and it means that these sorts of analyses that can be done through the Centre can be really helpful in both identifying the sort of unique diseases in certain countries, but just how do you manage this change?   You have countries with really high smoking rates in the region as well as places that are much less. The obesity epidemic is unfolding pretty quickly in some parts of it. So it’s sort of an advanced version that other regions will probably end up looking like as we go ahead a few decades, just because of the economic trajectory that’s been underway.   Rhonda Stewart: You both mentioned some of the different health issues and trends in the region – fertility, women’s health, NCDs. When you think about the pace of change – what are some of the most urgent or pressing issues to examine first?   Professor Chong Yap Seng: Well, I think as Chris mentioned, this region is unique in the sense that it’s undergone such quick socioeconomic transition. So just take Singapore, for example. We are only going to be 61 years old this year as a nation, and we’ve gone really in that time from 1965 and now from third-world to first-world very, very quickly.   So I think former agricultural-based economies in this region have now mostly gone into more industry and then technology-led sort of economies. And that’s going to put a huge strain on issues like obesity, diabetes, hypertension – all those things are rising very fast. And because this region hasn’t had that long history of health surveillance or public health agencies that have been very careful in monitoring the situation, we have fallen far behind in that respect. And so bringing in the methodology and precision of the Global Burden of Disease study work to this region is something that’s really important for governments to make rational decisions about where to invest in the public health structures.   So I think this is something that is very timely for the region. And with modern technology, AI, and digital data sources becoming increasingly available, this is really the best time to start to leverage this capability that IHME has.   Rhonda Stewart: How do you balance the challenge of assessing health trends at the broader regional level while taking into account issues that are specific to each country in the region? So obviously, in a region of this size, not all countries are the same. They don’t all experience health issues and trends in the same way. So how do you strike that balance of regional and country-specific analysis?   Professor Chong Yap Seng: Well, okay, I’ll start off first. So I would say that for example, Singapore – the Ministry of Health has worked with IHME for some time and have used the data specifically for Singapore to understand just what’s happening in Singapore. But this is something that not many of the other countries in this region have done.   So I think it’s timely that this Centre is set up so that we can start to help train the people in the region and expose them to the methodologies that have been developed by IHME so that other countries can start to use the kind of work IHME does to get better data about themselves. So I think it’s important both to study the region as a whole because of course the fact that it’s big and growing both in population and economic activity, and also to help countries to deal with the problems that they have within their own borders.   Rhonda Stewart: And Dr. Murray, how do you see that?   Dr. Christopher Murray: Yeah, I would just add to that that I think the value of both the country-specific work, which you obviously have to do if you’re going to inform local decision-making, local priorities. But having the ability to benchmark across countries in the region using very standardized methods is really h

  5. Feb 25

    How health systems and social determinants of health can guide policy

    IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray and UCLA Chancellor Dr. Julio Frenk discuss The Lancet Commission on Health Systems Performance Assessment and how the information will allow policymakers and other decision-makers to use resources strategically and improve health outcomes. ___________ Transcript Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart.   In this episode, we’ll hear from IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray and UCLA Chancellor Dr. Julio Frenk as they talk about the Lancet Commission on Health Systems Performance Assessment. The Commission’s work builds on a report by the World Health Organization in 2000 that analyzed and ranked the performance of health systems in WHO member states.   In the quarter century since the WHO report, the need to understand health systems performance has become more complex and more urgent. Disease burden has evolved along with health expenditure. Globally, low-, middle-, and high-income countries face unique challenges as well as challenges that cut across all countries.   The Commission is made up of experts from around the world. It will estimate the performance of countries’ health systems using the best available evidence and propose enhanced measurements of health system functions and goals. The information will allow policymakers and other decision-makers to use resources strategically and improve health outcomes.   Dr. Frenk and Dr. Murray, people are familiar with the components of a health care system, but what makes a health system broader, and what are those specific components?   Dr. Julio Frenk: Well, the health care system is a subsystem of the larger concept of the health system. Specifically, what most people come in contact with on a daily basis and as part of their personal experience is the health care system. Most people in the world today are born in contact with the health care system, will die in contact with the health care system, and will spend significant parts of their lives in the health care system.   What that refers to is the set of institutions that are mostly charged with providing what is conventionally defined as health services or personal health services or clinical services. The health system encompasses a broader set of institutions and actors and actions which we basically define as all those actors and institutions in a society whose primary intent is to improve health. And that includes most of the entities we call the health care system, hospitals, clinics, labs, the pharmaceutical industry, et cetera, et cetera. But it includes a broader set of institutions that are concerned with conserving, promoting, or improving health in a society.   Rhonda Stewart: Dr. Murray, anything to add on the components of a health system?   Dr. Christopher Murray: Well, there’s always a contingent of people who rightly point out that there are drivers of health like educational attainment, whose primary intent is not to improve health, but happen to be super important drivers. So the notion of the health system defined by primary intent does not deny the idea that there are broader social determinants of health. It just says there are these institutions in society who we have funded and created whose primary purpose is to improve health. And it is useful for us to look at that cluster of institutions and figure out who does well and what lessons we can learn about those primary institutions that are focused on improving health.   Rhonda Stewart: And in addition to educational attainment, are there other factors that are not technically part of a health system but influence health systems?   Dr. Julio Frenk: Yeah, there’s all kinds of what are called social determinants of health, which are other institutions. I mean, the economy, the economic forces, employment is a determinant of health, and housing is a determinant of health. But the purpose of housing is not directly to improve health, it is a determinant. When we talk of the health system as larger than the health care system, we’re talking mostly about other services that are not conventionally part of or even administratively part of the health care system. For example, a lot of what we do in public health, like the provision of clean water and sanitation, or some actions to improve the environment – because the primary intent of those actions is to improve health, they are part of the health system. There are also determinants of individual health status for the individuals that form that population. But that’s distinct and different than the education or employment or housing that are outside of the health system, although they exert a determination on the health of a community and of the individuals that comprise that community.   Rhonda Stewart: And tell us, both of you, what prompted the creation of the Lancet Commission on Health Systems Performance Assessment?   Dr. Julio Frenk: Well, let me say it was 25 years ago, a quarter of a century since the World Health Report 2000 was published. And a lot has happened in these 25 years.   Now that World Health Report 2000 did two things. It developed a very, I think, well thought through conceptual framework to understand what is a health system, what are the goals of health systems, what are health systems for, what are the functions that a health system has to perform to achieve its goals, and how do you define and measure performance? It was a very clearly articulated conceptual framework that’s been quite influential. Associated with the framework, the framework was translated into a measurement exercise that was carried at WHO by a new area that was created since Dr. Gro Brundtland became the Director-General in 1998 called Evidence and Information Policy that I was leading. And then within that, we have the Global Program on Evidence that Chris Murray was leading.   And Chris’s team orchestrated or developed a set of measurements and implemented those. And for the first time, the health system performance of all 192, I believe, was the number of member states of WHO back then – all of those were assessed and compared to produce some rankings that were highly debated, very controversial in many parts of the world, but it was the first rigorous attempt to measure and compare the performance of health systems.   Nothing of that scope has been carried out in this quarter-century, and yet the reality of health systems around the world has been transformed profoundly. So it’s, I think, an exercise that’s overdue to now rethink the conceptual framework, see if there are adjustments that are needed with everything that’s happened, including for example, the appearance of artificial intelligence as a major technological development and societal development, and also to try to again attempt a measurement. In the intervening 25 years, both the datasets and the analytical tools to apply to those datasets have improved enormously.   So we thought this is a great time to carry out again a comprehensive assessment of the performance of health systems that encompasses the entire world. There have been other assessments, but they are focused on subsets of countries. And this would be the second time that such an exercise for all countries of the world would be carried out.   Dr. Christopher Murray: Yeah, I think there’s, as Julio said, much better data, much better methods. But it’s also pretty timely to look at health system performance because we’ve gone through this big shock in 2025 in global health where funding was abruptly cut for a number of low-income countries due to the reductions of USAID and a number of European donors. And that’s reignited the interest globally, and in in fora with ministers of health, are there lessons you can learn about how to better organize health systems to get more health for the money, as Julio has often described in the past? So I think both the possibility of doing a much better empirical assessment and the interest – there’s a willing audience out there for whatever insights are possible in how to deliver both public health and health care more effectively, more efficiently.   Rhonda Stewart: Let’s talk about some of the specific challenges that face different types of countries. And let’s talk first about health systems challenges in high-income and middle-income countries. What are some of those challenges?   Dr. Julio Frenk: Well, there’s a huge number of challenges on the evolution of the health conditions of populations. First of all, the aging of populations has been for about a century changing the epidemiologic profile. And now we really have a very mixed bag of health challenges, both in terms of communicable diseases – some people had predicted that with the rise of non-communicable diseases, we would see communicable or infectious diseases become irrelevant. Clearly, if we needed any reminder, the COVID-19 pandemic just reminded us that infectious diseases are not going anywhere. They’re there. They continue to be a threat not just as outbreaks or pandemics, but as comorbidities of chronic illnesses and as problems in and of themselves aggravated by phenomena such as antimicrobial resistance.   So the nature and the complexity of health conditions in populations have continued to evolve and are extremely complex because they demand interventions that are in general much more costly, and that adds pressure. And the demand side for services is just increasing throughout all countries in the world, but particularly in high- and middle-income countries. High-income countries in particular also face, and middle-income countries as well, fiscal crises of different magnitudes and natures. We’re still feeling the after-effects of the pandemic in terms of inflation and budget constraints from all

  6. 10/14/2025

    Global Burden of Disease 2023 is officially released

    The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) is the most comprehensive assessment of health trends and conditions across countries. GBD provides detailed analysis of disease burden related to life expectancy, non-communicable diseases, mental health, and many other health topics. We discuss the latest GBD with IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray. Read the GBD 2023 capstones, published in The Lancet: • Global demographic analysis: http://ms.spr.ly/6047s2bOv • Global causes of death: http://ms.spr.ly/6040s2bOI • Global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors: http://ms.spr.ly/6041s2bOL Access and share all things related to GBD 2023: updated data visualization tools, comprehensive infographics, informative videos, workshops, webinars, and more: https://www.healthdata.org/announcing-launch-gbd-2023-study-results. ________________________ Transcript Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I’m Rhonda Stewart.    In this episode, we’ll hear from IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray as he talks about the latest Global Burden of Disease study, also known as GBD.     GBD 2023 is a series of three papers published in The Lancet and presented at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The papers focus on demographic analysis, causes of death, and diseases, injuries, and risk factors. GBD is the largest and most detailed scientific effort undertaken to quantify health trends. GBD provides a unique platform to compare the magnitude of diseases, injuries and risk factors across age groups, sexes, countries, regions, and time.    For decision-makers, the GBD approach provides a unique way to compare countries’ health progress and to understand factors that impact health such as high blood pressure, cancer, and heart disease.    Led by IHME at the University of Washington, GBD is a truly global effort, with more than 16,000 researchers from over 160 countries and territories participating in the most recent update. The latest GBD includes data on topics ranging from life expectancy to mental health to non-communicable diseases.    Chris, the 2023 Global Burden of Disease study covers three capstones published in The Lancet and presented at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The papers cover demographic analysis, causes of death, and diseases, injuries, and risk factors.    Let’s start by talking about the demographic analysis paper. The global age-standardized mortality rate declined significantly since 1950, but that’s only part of the story. What are some of the other key findings from that paper?    Christopher Murray: Well, in the demographic analysis, there’s both the long-term view of progress in expanding life expectancy that has been quite steady, except for the big interruptions due to the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the sort of mortality crises in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that occurred in the late 80s and 90s.    But other than those, up to 2019, we had this sort of pattern of progress that we got used to. Then the COVID epidemic came along: 18 million deaths related to COVID and a big drop in life expectancy, and then it really was even worse in 2021 in many countries. And then it bounced back. And so by 2023, we’ve gone in most places back to 2019 levels, but not back yet to the levels we would have expected if the pandemic hadn’t occurred. So that’s one big part of the story.    Another part is the fact that we’ve seen increases in child and adolescent mortality in some parts of the world, particularly some of the high-income countries – the US and Canada stand out. And then we've seen increases in mortality related to drug use disorders, suicides to some extent, in adults that are more in the 25- to 39-year range.    And then there are some changes in methods and data that we now think that younger adult mortality in Africa is higher than we previously thought and older adult mortality is little bit lower than we previously thought.    Rhonda Stewart: And with the causes of death paper, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for two-thirds of the world’s mortality and morbidity. What are some of the NCDs that are among the top causes and what accounts for this shift from infectious to noncommunicable diseases?    Christopher Murray: Well, the shift, which is really profound, toward noncommunicable disease causes of healthy life lost, which in the GBD we tend to quantify using a measure called disability-adjusted life years, which reflects premature mortality as well as functional health loss, so this sort of notion of loss of healthy life. And those shifts are very noticeable in lower-middle-income countries and upper-middle-income countries. They’re still occurring in low-income as well, but it’s really profound in the middle-income slice of the world.    So that by 2023, at the top of the list of NCDs and causes of burden is ischemic heart disease. And then the next among the NCDs is stroke, and then diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.    And then we get into things that cause functional health loss like low back pain, depression, anxiety,  as other big NCD causes that are going up very substantially. And as we go farther down the list, there are things like lung cancer and chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s – these are things that are also going up.    The transition toward NCDs is driven mostly by aging, that the average age of the population gets older in places, mostly because of the declines in fertility. Also, the rates of disease by age have been mostly declining, but declining at a slower rate in the older age groups than population growth. And so you get this more marked shift to NCDs because the rates of progress for the infectious diseases, communicable diseases, as well as maternal and neonatal causes tend to be faster. And so that’s also a contributor to this big transition we’re observing.    Rhonda Stewart: Let’s go back for a second and talk about health loss. So you mentioned health loss and aging. Why is it so important to measure health loss, which is something that other studies really don’t do in the way that GBD does? As people live longer, you’re not necessarily living those years in good health. Why is it important to quantify that?    Christopher Murray: Well, the reason in the 34-year history of the Global Burden of Disease that we’ve always focused on, in addition to reporting standard metrics like death and death rates and causes of death and disease incidence and prevalence, is we roll these up into measures of health loss so that we capture these conditions like mental health disorders, like musculoskeletal disorders,  like drug use, where most of the effect is reducing people’s functional health and not necessarily increasing death rates.    So if you only focus on death, you’re not going to pay attention to things like anxiety and depression and schizophrenia, or back pain, neck pain, that are quite widely experienced and really have a major effect on people’s life. So that’s why we like to look at health loss. When we do look at health loss, there’s a second component to it, which is we’re saying that if you die at a young age, let’s say from an injury at 25, a road traffic injury, that’s a greater loss of health than if you die at 95 from, let’s say, lung cancer.    So we want to capture both the amount of life that somebody’s lost due to premature death, as well as this dimension of things that cause disability or impairment that don’t necessarily kill you. When you do that, you end up with this more complicated, mixed view of what are the leading causes. They include things like back pain or depression. And they also suggest that as lifespan has increased,  We’re not making a lot of progress on reducing the number of years that people live with substantial loss of health function.    Rhonda Stewart: Interesting. And let’s talk about risk factors. So the analysis notes that half of the world’s disease burden is not only preventable, but there are almost 100 modifiable risk factors. What are some of those and how do they contribute to disease burden?    Christopher Murray: Well, the biggest sources of burden, of risk factor–attributable burden,  are a mixture of things that are both behavioral, metabolic, and environmental. At the top is high blood pressure. It’s the number one risk factor around the world. And then that accounts for, as a percent of health loss, more than 8% of all burden is related to high blood pressure.    And then we have, as number two, we have particulate air pollution, both indoor and outdoor, and that’s also slightly over 8% of all burden. And then we fall into a behavioral risk, which is smoking, as number three, and then high blood sugar is number four. Then low birth weight and short gestation, a  critical risk for neonatal death, comes in at number five.  Obesity and overweight is number six. And then we get into kidney dysfunction, high cholesterol,  child growth failure. And interestingly now, which is sort of new for GBD 2023 in the top 10 is lead.  And that’s a change from previous assessments, that lead is now so prominent.    Rhonda Stewart: Okay, let’s go back for a second to some of the things you mentioned about anxiety and depression. The latest GBD provides really important information on mental health. Tell us about some of those findings.    Christopher Murray: Well, mental health as a share of health loss is going up quite steadily around the world. And there’s a sort of steady rise that started in some countries. We can see that rise starting around 2010.    But there was a big jump in anxiety and depression during COVID And although it’s come down somewhat after COVID, it has not come down to th

  7. 10/14/2025

    Advocating for access to oral health care in rural Nigeria

    In Nigeria, less than 20% of the population has access to oral health care. This reflects a stark reality in many parts of the world--dental health remains one of the most neglected areas of public health. Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan, Executive Director of the Dentalcare Foundation, rural dentist, and advocate for oral health advancement in Nigeria, has been named IHME's 2025 Roux Prize winner.  The Roux Prize recognizes individuals all over the globe who have used evidence-based health data to improve population health. The prize is sponsored by IHME’s founding board member David Roux and his wife, Barbara. • Learn more about Dr. Adeniyan's work and impact in her community: https://www.healthdata.org/research-analysis/library/2025-roux-prize-recipient-dr-adekemi-adeniyan • Read the press release announcement about Dr. Adeniyan for this year's Roux Prize: https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/ihmes-2025-roux-prize-awarded-rural-health-equity-advocate _______________________________ Transcript Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Hi, I’m Rhonda Stewart.     In Nigeria, less than 20% of the population has access to oral health care. This reflects a stark reality: in many parts of the world, dental health remains one of the most neglected areas of public health. The Dentalcare Foundation has deployed mobile dental clinics and Nigeria’s first solar-powered tele-dental kiosks, delivering care to over 100,000 people in rural communities.    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan is the Executive Director of the Dentalcare Foundation. She is a rural dentist, advocate for oral health advancement, and winner of the 2025 Roux Prize. Now in its 12th year, the Roux Prize recognizes individuals all over the globe who have used evidence-based health data to improve population health.    The prize is sponsored by IHME’s founding board member David Roux and his wife, Barbara.    Dr. Adeniyan is passionate about collaboration. The Dentalcare Foundation has trained over 2,500 teachers and community health workers to promote oral health in their localities, helping to create a network of advocates that multiplies her impact across borders.    Dr. Adeniyan joined the conversation from Nigeria.    Dr. Adeniyan, congratulations on being named the 2025 Roux Prize winner on behalf of the Dentalcare Foundation. Before we dive into your work, tell us about why the foundation was established – what are the problems that it was created to solve?    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here and such an honor to be the 2025 Roux Prize winner.    You know, I grew up in Agege, Lagos, Nigeria. It’s kind of a slum and a crowded community. And in that community, access to health care, especially dental care, is almost nonexistent. And for me, I saw many of our neighbors living with toothache for years. They couldn’t afford treatment. And I myself, at the age of 7, I had toothache and I couldn’t even afford to tell my parents about it because one, there was no access to a dental care facility. And at that time my parents couldn’t even afford it.    So communities like this experience children’s laughter being silenced with pain. And this is something that can easily be prevented. So years later, as a dentist, I got to serve in a rural community in Nigeria. That was when I realized that little had changed. Nothing had changed. In fact, patients would travel hours to come into my dental clinic just to have one tooth removed. They wouldn't be able to pay for it.    I would see many children come in, some who had never owned a toothbrush or seen a dentist in their life. And this broke my heart. Day to day, day to day.    So that was why I decided to start Dentalcare Foundation – to make sure that every child has access to dental health care no matter where they are born, no matter where they find themselves.    And the mission of the organization is simple. We just bring oral health care and education to communities that have been long forgotten. And our biggest problem, should I say the problem that we’ve been created to solve, is inequity – oral health inequity.    For instance, in Nigeria, less than 20% have ever visited a dentist. And many in the rural communities where I work, they don’t even have access to a dentist. There’s only one dentist to every 100,000 people. And that in itself is a gap.    If you want to compare it to the World Health Organization’s recommendation, which is like one dentist to 7,500 people, that’s a really staggering gap. And so that’s why my organization goes to ensure that there’s proper education. Because tooth decay and gum diseases are more common in this area of the world, yet their education is lacking.    Rhonda Stewart: That’s incredibly powerful. So for you, it was a mix of personal experience and then things that you’ve seen as a physician and as a dentist.    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: I feel like the organization was born out of pain and purpose.    Rhonda Stewart: Yes, born out of pain and purpose. You spoke about the situation in Nigeria. What do you think accounts for the small number of dentists in the country?    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: Well, first of all, we are a country of over 200 million people, and the country has fewer than 5,000 dentists. So you can imagine 5,000 dentists serving over 200 million people. And most of these dentists are concentrated in the major cities like Lagos and Abuja. So a child in a rural village could grow up and never, ever see a dentist.    Now, number two is that most of the public dental clinics are very, very underfunded. Preventive care is not prioritized, and oral health care is generally not seen as overall well-being. And most of the national health campaigns that is in Nigeria, they are tailored toward malaria, maternal health, HIV, and it’s understandable. But rarely do you find things that are tailored toward oral health. And because of the lack of dentists and the lack of information, this gap is always existing. So even though poor oral health is linked to heart diseases, diabetes, pregnancy complications and all, it’s still being silent because nobody hears about it.    And that’s why my advocacy really focuses on helping people and policymakers understand why the mouth is not separate from the body and why we need to change the narrative.    Rhonda Stewart: And you just alluded to this in a very powerful way. Why is it that you think that dental care is such an overlooked component of public health?    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: Well, that’s so interesting because I feel like this is a question I always ask myself all the time. But I think it’s because dental care doesn’t really scream for attention like every other health issue that we have, until it’s too late.    A toothache doesn’t come like an emergency until someone can’t eat, someone can’t sleep, or someone can’t go to school because of pain. And the truth is, globally, 3.5 billion people around the world have been affected by oral health, yet it’s still being silent. That is because most people think is not a priority.    Most countries spend less than 1% of their health budget on dental care – for Nigeria especially. And this is just negligible. And I would say part of it is perception. Perception, perception, perception. People think oral health is cosmetic. People think oral health is just one of those things that can be sidelined.    But the truth is oral health is about your dignity. It’s about your confidence, about an opportunity. A child who hides their smile may struggle in school or in social life. It can even affect your relationship, or getting a job. So when we talk about oral health, we are really talking about the potential of people, but it’s seen in the wrong perspective. That’s why I think the perception around oral health needs to change.    Rhonda Stewart: Absolutely. In addition to your work with the Dentalcare Foundation, you are also the founder of a health edtech company called Smile Superheroes. Tell us about that work.    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: Yeah, Smile Superheroes is a health edtech company. And the main aim of the company is to simplify health information for children.    So what we do is that we use storybooks, animation, and virtual reality to make learning about health fun, inclusive, and most unforgettable for them. I often describe this as the Disney of health care, because we believe that children everywhere deserve to see themselves as the heroes of their own health story.    And that is why we create the stories and animations to allow children to think about health in a different way – allowing children to literally step inside a storybook or an animation and learn how to play but also learn about their health.    Rhonda Stewart: That’s fantastic. And let’s talk a little bit about the impact of your work. We would love to hear about the impact of your Smile Superheroes work, as well as the impact of your Dentalcare Foundation work.    Dr. Adekemi Adeniyan: Yeah, it’s a great thing because what started as a one-man organization, Dentalcare Foundation today has become a movement. And that’s the way I see it because we’ve provided free oral health care and education to over 120,000 children, not just in Nigeria, but across Philippines, South Africa, Ghana, just across the world. We’ve trained community health workers and teachers to promote daily brushing and oral hygiene in schools because we believe that they have first contact with children.    And our Healthy Mouth campaign has distributed over 30,000 toothbrushes and hygiene kits in many rural communities. In Nigeria, we’ve partnered with Ministry of Health Education. We crea

  8. 07/15/2025

    Financing Global Health 2025: Cuts could reverse decades of progress

    Development assistance for health (DAH) is at its lowest level in 15 years. This funding backs health programs around the world and addresses diseases and conditions including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and maternal and child health. In 2025, many donors (including the United States) cut back sharply on their contributions. There are concerns that cuts to development assistance for health could reverse decades of progress made. Lead author Dr. Angela Apeagyei (Assistant Professor at IHME) and senior author Dr. Joe Dieleman (Professor at IHME) outline changes to DAH and share highlights from the report, Financing Global Health in this episode.  An independent population health research organization based at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) works with collaborators around the world to develop timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence that illuminates the state of health everywhere. In making our research available and approachable, we aim to inform health policy and practice in pursuit of our vision: all people living long lives in full health. Learn more about IHME. Where to follow us: LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) YouTube

See All (37)

About

Dive into the latest trending topics in global health with IHME’s Global Health Insights podcast. Our health researchers explain the significance of new studies, share data related to current events, and help you understand the story behind the numbers.

Information

  • Creator
    Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    37
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    IHME’s Global Health Insights

You Might Also Like