In 2015, about half of the world’s 28 million human deaths were the result of medical emergencies, with the bulk of the burden borne by poorer nations, according to a statistical analysis of information from nearly 200 countries by a Johns Hopkins Medicine researcher.
In 2015, about half of the world’s 28 million human deaths were the result of medical emergencies, with the bulk of the burden borne by poorer nations, according to a statistical analysis of information from nearly 200 countries by a Johns Hopkins Medicine researcher. The analysis, described in April in the journal BMJ Global Health, offered what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind look at the lethal impact of medical emergencies worldwide.
“In terms of global health, most of the research has traditionally focused on primary care and disease prevention, and emergency care has not been a priority,” says Junaid Razzak, M.B.B.S, Ph.D., professor of emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Emergency Medicine. “We believe our study is among the first to identify the scope of the burden emergency medical conditions — combining injuries, strokes, heart attacks and lung infections — impose overall and in specific countries.” The results, he added, could lead to future public health strategies that save lives and redirect resources.
In their study, Razzak and fellow researchers started with morbidity and mortality data involving more than 30 emergency medical conditions in 195 countries. The data were drawn from the 1990 and 2015 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies, an internationally collaborative database of hundreds of medical condition statistics housed at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and commonly used by researchers around the globe. In general, an emergency condition was defined as those requiring interventions within minutes to hours to reduce the chance of disability and death and improve health outcomes.
Read more at Johns Hopkins Medicine
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