SciDev.Net

This report is the WHO's official record of data produced by its technical programmes and regional offices in close consultation with countries and in collaboration with researchers and development agencies. The WHO produces the statistics to provide an evidence base for strategies to improve global public health.

The report clearly shows that the global burden of disease is shifting from infectious diseases to non-communicable diseases, with chronic conditions such as heart disease and stroke now being the chief causes of death globally. The shifting trends indicate that leading infectious diseases — diarrhoea, HIV, tuberculosis, neonatal infections and malaria — will become less important causes of death globally over the next 20 years.

The report documents in detail "the levels of mortality in children and adults, patterns of morbidity and burden of disease, prevalence of risk factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, use of health care, availability of health care workers, and health care financing."

This joint publication between the World Health Organization and the Global Forum for Health Research reveals mental health research capacity in 114 low-income and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The extensive review identified over 10,000 articles, 4,633 mental health researchers and 3,829 other stakeholders. The authors argue that this is "the first systematic attempt to confirm the pressing needs of improving research capacity in mental health".

The publication provides useful details in table and charts, analysed by group of stakeholders and by region, on topics such as: researchers' profiles; priority-setting process; amount and type of research production; services and technical support available to them; courses and trainings offered; funding patterns; and dissemination of research findings. The appendix provides two extensive lists — by country — of policy and practice that resulted from research evidence, as well as research evidence that was never translated into policy and practice.

Nine recommendations indicate how the management of mental health research can be strengthened so that it meets the national needs of the countries as well as contributes to the global fund of knowledge. The authors say their report thus enables evidence-based decision-making in funding and priority setting in the area of mental health research in low-income and middle-income countries.

These consist of two reports: SuRF1(Surveillance of risk factors related to non-communicable diseases: current status of global data) and SuRF2 (Surveillance of chronic disease risk factors: country-level data and comparable estimates).

These reports are the result of a large WHO project to set up for the first time a global database of the prevalence of risk factors for non-communicable diseases collected from WHO member states. The first report is largely a collection of the country profiles; the second analyses the data to produce comparable estimates for risk factor prevalence in the countries. The WHO designed this as an advocacy tool to highlight where primary prevention and health promotion need to be directed.

The eight risk factors were chosen because they are easily measurable and theoretically can be changed through prevention efforts. They are: tobacco and alcohol use, patterns of physical inactivity, low fruit/vegetable intake, obesity (as measured by BMI), blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes (measured by blood glucose).

The second report presents country-level estimates for overweight/obesity and systolic blood pressure. It also shows the attributable mortality and disease burden from all causes of death due to these overweight and high blood pressure for the 11 most populated countries. 

(See WHO Global InfoBase Online for electronically searchable data contained in the reports http://www.who.int/infobase/surf2/online.html.)

Chronic diseases — heart and lung disease, cancer and diabetes — are having a negative economic impact on both the developed and developing world, says this report, which is why they should be properly addressed by domestic and international policy makers. Compared to the epidemiological evidence on the rise of non-communicable diseases in developing nations, there is little information on how this increase will affect their economies.

This report investigates the demographics of the problem and finds that contrary to popular belief, the disproportionate burden of disease on the elderly does have economic implications. The reason is that though the elderly may not be part of the workforce, they are still consumers and therefore a part of the economic equation.

Whether approaches to tackling chronic diseases are cost-effective or not is a vital issue for countries whose health budgets are already overstretched — the report outlines some of the interventions that offer most bang for buck. The authors point out that strategies that work well in developed countries are not so effective in developing countries, and call for more research to assess what will be appropriate.

This extensive report was one of the first to document the scale of the problem of chronic diseases in developing countries, and crucially, to offer guidance on feasible and practical methods of tackling them.

The document starts by laying out in detail the profiles of chronic diseases in different countries, projections for the future, and how chronic diseases are linked with poverty. It also examines in depth the economic costs of such diseases and the macroeconomic consequences of not tackling them quickly enough. The authors outline interventions — whether community, workplace, or school — that have robust evidence supporting them.

The report ends with a call for a unifying framework of global health experts and stakeholders, in which the government has a key role. It also specifies what policymakers need to do to ensure that measures to tackle chronic diseases are put into action.

This paper presents a review of the challenges of international scholarly scientific collaboration. It looks at institutional constraints and points out that the challenges and problems multiply when collaborators come from different countries with differing conditions, resource endowments and institutional structures. It is easier to call for more and better forms of international collaboration than it is to design them. The report asserts that good design is helped by a better understanding of what collaboration is and how it has been carried out. It draws on social research insights to help reduce the transactional, financial, ethical and emotional costs of international linkages and exchange and provides a conceptual framework for thinking about international collaboration issues.

Commissioned by UK Office of Science and Innovation, the report looks at the trend of international scientific collaboration between the United Kingdom and its leading partners. It uses bibliometric data (co-authorship and citations of scientific articles) to capture international scientific collaboration in seven broad research fields, focusing on Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, UK and the US. The data deals with two time-periods, 1996–2000 and 2001–2005 and the report finds that publication of co-authored articles on scientific collaboration has increased considerably faster than the overall increase in research across the two time-periods. It also finds that countries vary in their ability to collaborate or to benefit from it. The results may have important implications for putting international scientific collaborative arrangements in place.