Washington, Nov 30: A recent study by researchers at the Yale school of Medicine has revealed that global health inequalities were substantial, growing, and equally influenced by economic, social and health-sector variables as geography.
“Particularly disturbing findings from this study are that countries with high mortality in young children are making slow progress, gaps in adult mortality are becoming wider, and countries with the highest adult mortality have reversed their trend from mortality reduction,” said Jennifer Prah Ruger, assistant professor of public health in the
Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine in his study in the November issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
According to Prof. Ruger, this is the first systematic study of global inequalities in adult and child mortality to identify three distinct mortality groups—better off, worse-off and mid-level using cluster analysis methods.
For his study, Prof. Ruger tried to link new associations and structure in data, and examine the underlying risk factors associated with inequality in mortality.
“Unlike previous studies, this research focuses on gaps in health inequalities between countries,” Prof. Ruger said.
She found that the probability of a child dying before age five and an adult dying at an early age was disproportionately higher throughout sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan than in countries in any other geographic region.
“These countries have lower average incomes, more extreme poverty, higher inflation and less trade. They also have lower levels of investment in human and physical resources, more health risk factors and less effective disease prevention, and worse educational outcomes,” she said in her study.
Prof. Ruger and co-author Hak Ju Kim from the Department of Social Welfare, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, South Korea, found that these countries had a four-fold higher percentage of people living on less than one dollar per day; more than double the female illiteracy rate, less than one-sixth the gross national income in international dollars; and one-fifth the outpatient visits, hospital beds, and physicians as their low-mortality counterparts.
“The study shows an even greater gap in total per capita expenditure on health care: a 20-fold difference in spending between countries with low and high adult mortality and a 50-fold difference in spending between countries with low and high under five-year old mortality,” Prof. Ruger added.
“The AIDS epidemic is likely driving some of the gap in adult mortality. We found that countries with high adult mortality rates had roughly 35 times the prevalence of HIV infection than the lowest mortality countries,” she said.
Bureau Report