Several pandemics such as the Spanish flu, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome have come and gone with similar consequences felt after they were contained. It suggests that a critical study of events after past pandemics can help one make an informed guess about what to expect after the current pandemic. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the post-events of past pandemics to predict events after Covid-19. Published articles were collected and reviewed from scholarly literature web search engines and citation databases such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. Information gathering for this study was largely done in the second quarter of 2020 on mainly Google Scholar with the final inclusion criteria word search being pandemic, epidemic, plague, disease, crises, infection, viral, and outbreak whiles the final exclusion criteria word search being science, scientific, environment, biology, chemistry, law, and political. Peer-reviewed articles were sorted and reviewed to contribute to understanding and developing perspective in assessing past pandemics and Covid-19. Other authentic non-peer-reviewed online sources were also searched, and their required information was considered. Literature was reviewed on historical pandemics, which killed many people up to percentages of the whole population. Although all of them were deadly, the three recent outbreaks were checked in-depth, namely the 1918 Spanish Flu, Ebola, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The current pandemic, as declared by the World Health Organization, is Covid-19. This study makes several predictions under the social and psychological, economic, global, and benefits of Covid-19. They are fear and paranoia among people, the psychological need of survivors, stigmatization, growth in religious fanaticism, stock market returns, increment in unemployment, higher cost of doing business, impact to the global financial system, temporary dysfunctional global supply chains, the cost to the world economy, increased interest in infectious disease prevention, stronger bonding between humans and nations, and advancement in clinical research.
<p>The articles presented in this special issue advance the conversation by describing the current efforts, findings and concerns related to Big Data and health disparities. They offer important recommendations and perspectives to consider when designing systems that can usefully leverage Big Data to reduce health disparities. We hope that ongoing Big Data efforts can build on these contributions to advance the conversation, address our embedded assumptions, and identify levers for action to reduce health care disparities.</p><p><em>Ethn Dis. </em>2017;27(2):69-72; doi:10.18865/ed.27.2.69.</p>
Genomic research is one of the tools for elucidating the pathogenesis of diseases of global health relevance and paving the research dimension to clinical and public health translation. Recent advances in genomic research and technologies have increased our understanding of human diseases, genes associated with these disorders, and the relevant mechanisms. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have proliferated since the first studies were published several years ago and have become an important tool in helping researchers comprehend human variation and the role genetic variants play in disease. However, the need to expand the diversity of populations in GWAS has become increasingly apparent as new knowledge is gained about genetic variation. Inclusion of diverse populations in genomic studies is critical to a more complete understanding of human variation and elucidation of the underpinnings of complex diseases. In this review, we summarize the available data on GWAS in recent African ancestry populations within the western hemisphere (i.e. African Americans and peoples of the Caribbean) and continental African populations. Furthermore, we highlight ways in which genomic studies in populations of recent African ancestry have led to advances in the areas of malaria, HIV, prostate cancer, and other diseases. Finally, we discuss the advantages of conducting GWAS in recent African ancestry populations in the context of addressing existing and emerging global health conditions.
<p>Hypertension, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, imposes a significant public health burden and challenge to address it worldwide. Scaling up delivery of proven, effective interventions for hypertension could significantly advance the goal of reducing the global burden. Although significant progress has been made in many countries, some lament that large-scale initiatives focused on reducing blood pressure in global populations have not effectively addressed this challenge. Late-stage implementation research plays a critical role in determining effective and sustainable scale-up of these initiatives. In this article, we briefly discuss some of the global initiatives that have been funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the US National Institutes of Health. Intervention delivery strategies in low resource settings must have demonstrated effectiveness and consideration for the social, cultural and physical context (eg, access, affordability, and availability of medications) in which a program is being delivered in order to be sustainable nationally and globally. Hence, the use of implementation research is central to determining sustainable delivery of evidence-based and tailored interventions focused on hypertension control. The sustained control of hypertension in global populations holds tremendous potential for reducing morbidity, premature mortality, and the adverse economic impact of cardiovascular disease in all regions. <em>Ethn Dis. </em>2016; 26(3):395-398; doi:10.18865/ ed.26.3.395 </p>
<p>Achieving health equity requires that every person has the opportunity to attain their full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances. Inequity experienced by populations of lower socioeconomic status is reflected in differences in health status and mortality rates, as well as in the distribution of disease, disability and illness across these population groups. This article gives an overview of the health inequities literature associated with heart, lung, blood and sleep (HLBS) disorders. We present an ecological framework that provides a theoretical foundation to study late-stage T4 translation research that studies implementation strategies for proven effective interventions to address health inequities. <em>Ethn Dis. </em>2016;26(3):387-394; doi:10.18865/ ed.26.3.387 </p>
Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) bear the brunt of communicable and non-communicable diseases and experience higher mortality and poor health outcomes compared to resource-rich countries. Chronic resource deficits in LMICs impede their ability to successfully address vexing health issues. Implementation science provides researchers with an approach to develop specific interventions that can generate and/or maximize resources to facilitate the implementation of other public health interventions, in resource-constrained LMIC settings. Resources generated from these interventions could be in the form of increased health workers' skills, task shifting to free up higher-skilled health workers, increasing laboratory capacity, and using supply chain innovations to make medications available. Pivotal to the success of such interventions is ensuring feasibility in the LMIC context. We selected and appraised three case studies of evidence-based resource-generating health interventions based in LMICs (Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar), which generated or maximized resources to facilitate ongoing health services. We used a determinant implementation framework—Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) to identify and map contextual factors that are reported to influence implementation feasibility in an LMIC setting. Contextual factors influencing the feasibility of these interventions included leadership engagement, local capacity building and readiness for research and implementing evidence-based practices (EBPs), infrastructural support for multilevel scale-up, and cultural and contextual adaptations. These factors highlight the importance of utilizing implementation science frameworks to evaluate, guide, and execute feasible public health interventions and projects in resource-limited settings. Within LMICs, we recommend EBPs incorporate feasible resource-generating components in health interventions to ensure improved and sustained optimal health outcomes.
<p class="Default">Addressing minority health and health disparities has been a missing piece of the puzzle in Big Data science. This article focuses on three priority opportunities that Big Data science may offer to the reduction of health and health care disparities. One opportunity is to incorporate standardized information on demographic and social determinants in electronic health records in order to target ways to improve quality of care for the most disadvantaged populations over time. A second opportunity is to enhance public health surveillance by linking geographical variables and social determinants of health for geographically defined populations to clinical data and health outcomes. Third and most importantly, Big Data science may lead to a better understanding of the etiology of health disparities and understanding of minority health in order to guide intervention development. However, the promise of Big Data needs to be considered in light of significant challenges that threaten to widen health disparities. Care must be taken to incorporate diverse populations to realize the potential benefits. Specific recommendations include investing in data collection on small sample populations, building a diverse workforce pipeline for data science, actively seeking to reduce digital divides, developing novel ways to assure digital data privacy for small populations, and promoting widespread data sharing to benefit under-resourced minority-serving institutions and minority researchers. With deliberate efforts, Big Data presents a dramatic opportunity for reducing health disparities but without active engagement, it risks further widening them.</p><p class="Default"><em>Ethn.Dis;</em>2017;27(2):95-106; doi:10.18865/ed.27.2.95.</p>
Four decades ago, U.S. life expectancy was within the same range as other high-income peer countries. However, during the past decades, the United States has fared worse in many key health domains resulting in shorter life expectancy and poorer health—a health disadvantage. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute convened a panel of national and international health experts and stakeholders for a Think Tank meeting to explore the U.S. health disadvantage and to seek specific recommendations for implementation research opportunities for heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders. Recommendations for National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute consideration were made in several areas including understanding the drivers of the disadvantage, identifying potential solutions, creating strategic partnerships with common goals, and finally enhancing and fostering a research workforce for implementation research. Key recommendations included exploring why the United States is doing better for health indicators in a few areas compared with peer countries; targeting populations across the entire socioeconomic spectrum with interventions at all levels in order to prevent missing a substantial proportion of the disadvantage; assuring partnership have high-level goals that can create systemic change through collective impact; and finally, increasing opportunities for implementation research training to meet the current needs. Connecting with the research community at large and building on ongoing research efforts will be an important strategy. Broad partnerships and collaboration across the social, political, economic, and private sectors and all civil society will be critical—not only for implementation research but also for implementing the findings to have the desired population impact. Developing the relevant knowledge to tackle the U.S. health disadvantage is the necessary first step to improve U.S. health outcomes.
High-resolution estimates of HIV burden across space and time provide an important tool for tracking and monitoring the progress of prevention and control efforts and assist with improving the precision and efficiency of targeting efforts. We aimed to assess HIV incidence and HIV mortality for all second-level administrative units across sub-Saharan Africa. ; his work was primarily supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (grant OPP1132415). Additionally, O Adetokunboh acknowledges the support of the Department of Science and Innovation, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. M Ausloos, A Pana, and C Herteliu are partially supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (Romania; project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCCF-2016-0084). T W Bärnighausen was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through the Alexander von Humboldt Professor award, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. M J Bockarie is supported by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership. F Carvalho and E Fernandes acknowledge support from Portuguese national funds (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior; UIDB/50006/2020, UIDB/04378/2020, and UIDP/04378/2020. K Deribe is supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant 201900/Z/16/Z) as part of his International Intermediate Fellowship. B-F Hwang was partially supported by China Medical University (CMU107-Z-04), Taichung, Taiwan. M Jakovljevic acknowledges support of the Serbia Ministry of Education Science and Technological Development (grant OI 175 014). M N Khan acknowledges the support of Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, Bangladesh. Y J Kim was supported by the Research Management Centre, Xiamen University Malaysia, Malaysia, (XMUMRF/2020-C6/ITCM/0004). K Krishnan is supported by University Grants Commission Centre of Advanced Study, (CAS II), awarded to the Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. M Kumar would like to acknowledge National Institutes of Health and Fogarty International Cente (K43TW010716). I Landires is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigación, which is supported by the Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, Panama. W Mendoza is a program analyst in population and development at the UN Population Fund Country Office in Peru, which does not necessarily endorse this study. M Phetole received institutional support from the Grants, Innovation and Product Development Unit, South African Medical Research Council. O Odukoya acknowledges support from the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health (K43TW010704). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health. O Oladimeji is grateful for the support from Walter Sisulu University, Eastern Cape, South Africa, the University of Botswana, Botswana, and the University of Technology of Durban, Durban, South Africa. J R Padubidri acknowledges support from Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. G C Patton is supported by an Australian Government National Health and Medical Research Council research fellowship. P Rathi acknowledges Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal India. A I Ribeiro was supported by National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under the programme of Stimulus of Scientific Employment–Individual Support (CEECIND/02386/2018). A M Samy acknowledges the support of the Egyptian Fulbright Mission Program. F Sha was supported by the Shenzhen Social Science Fund (SZ2020C015) and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (KQTD20190929172835662). A Sheikh is supported by Health Data Research UK. N Taveira acknowledges partial funding by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal, and Aga Khan Development Network—Portugal Collaborative Research Network in Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (332821690), and by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (RIA2016MC-1615). C S Wiysonge is supported by the South African Medical Research Council. Y Zhang was supported by the Science and Technology Research Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (Q20201104) and Open Fund Project of Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Occupational Hazard Identification and Control (OHIC2020Y01).Editorial note: the Lancet Group takes a neutral position with respect to territorial claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
High-resolution estimates of HIV burden across space and time provide an important tool for tracking and monitoring the progress of prevention and control efforts and assist with improving the precision and efficiency of targeting efforts. We aimed to assess HIV incidence and HIV mortality for all second-level administrative units across sub-Saharan Africa. ; his work was primarily supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (grant OPP1132415). Additionally, O Adetokunboh acknowledges the support of the Department of Science and Innovation, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. M Ausloos, A Pana, and C Herteliu are partially supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (Romania; project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCCF-2016-0084). T W Bärnighausen was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through the Alexander von Humboldt Professor award, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. M J Bockarie is supported by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership. F Carvalho and E Fernandes acknowledge support from Portuguese national funds (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior; UIDB/50006/2020, UIDB/04378/2020, and UIDP/04378/2020. K Deribe is supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant 201900/Z/16/Z) as part of his International Intermediate Fellowship. B-F Hwang was partially supported by China Medical University (CMU107-Z-04), Taichung, Taiwan. M Jakovljevic acknowledges support of the Serbia Ministry of Education Science and Technological Development (grant OI 175 014). M N Khan acknowledges the support of Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, Bangladesh. Y J Kim was supported by the Research Management Centre, Xiamen University Malaysia, Malaysia, (XMUMRF/2020-C6/ITCM/0004). K Krishnan is supported by University Grants Commission Centre of Advanced Study, (CAS II), awarded to the Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. M Kumar would like to acknowledge National Institutes of Health and Fogarty International Cente (K43TW010716). I Landires is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigación, which is supported by the Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, Panama. W Mendoza is a program analyst in population and development at the UN Population Fund Country Office in Peru, which does not necessarily endorse this study. M Phetole received institutional support from the Grants, Innovation and Product Development Unit, South African Medical Research Council. O Odukoya acknowledges support from the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health (K43TW010704). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health. O Oladimeji is grateful for the support from Walter Sisulu University, Eastern Cape, South Africa, the University of Botswana, Botswana, and the University of Technology of Durban, Durban, South Africa. J R Padubidri acknowledges support from Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. G C Patton is supported by an Australian Government National Health and Medical Research Council research fellowship. P Rathi acknowledges Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal India. A I Ribeiro was supported by National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under the programme of Stimulus of Scientific Employment–Individual Support (CEECIND/02386/2018). A M Samy acknowledges the support of the Egyptian Fulbright Mission Program. F Sha was supported by the Shenzhen Social Science Fund (SZ2020C015) and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (KQTD20190929172835662). A Sheikh is supported by Health Data Research UK. N Taveira acknowledges partial funding by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal, and Aga Khan Development Network—Portugal Collaborative Research Network in Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (332821690), and by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (RIA2016MC-1615). C S Wiysonge is supported by the South African Medical Research Council. Y Zhang was supported by the Science and Technology Research Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (Q20201104) and Open Fund Project of Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Occupational Hazard Identification and Control (OHIC2020Y01).Editorial note: the Lancet Group takes a neutral position with respect to territorial claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
BACKGROUND: Timely assessment of the burden of HIV/AIDS is essential for policy setting and programme evaluation. In this report from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015), we provide national estimates of levels and trends of HIV/AIDS incidence, prevalence, coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART), and mortality for 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. METHODS: For countries without high-quality vital registration data, we estimated prevalence and incidence with data from antenatal care clinics and population-based seroprevalence surveys, and with assumptions by age and sex on initial CD4 distribution at infection, CD4 progression rates (probability of progression from higher to lower CD4 cell-count category), on and off antiretroviral therapy (ART) mortality, and mortality from all other causes. Our estimation strategy links the GBD 2015 assessment of all-cause mortality and estimation of incidence and prevalence so that for each draw from the uncertainty distribution all assumptions used in each step are internally consistent. We estimated incidence, prevalence, and death with GBD versions of the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP) and Spectrum software originally developed by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). We used an open-source version of EPP and recoded Spectrum for speed, and used updated assumptions from systematic reviews of the literature and GBD demographic data. For countries with high-quality vital registration data, we developed the cohort incidence bias adjustment model to estimate HIV incidence and prevalence largely from the number of deaths caused by HIV recorded in cause-of-death statistics. We corrected these statistics for garbage coding and HIV misclassification. FINDINGS: Global HIV incidence reached its peak in 1997, at 3·3 million new infections (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1-3·4 million). Annual incidence has stayed relatively constant at about 2·6 million per year (range 2·5-2·8 million) since 2005, after a period of fast decline between 1997 and 2005. The number of people living with HIV/AIDS has been steadily increasing and reached 38·8 million (95% UI 37·6-40·4 million) in 2015. At the same time, HIV/AIDS mortality has been declining at a steady pace, from a peak of 1·8 million deaths (95% UI 1·7-1·9 million) in 2005, to 1·2 million deaths (1·1-1·3 million) in 2015. We recorded substantial heterogeneity in the levels and trends of HIV/AIDS across countries. Although many countries have experienced decreases in HIV/AIDS mortality and in annual new infections, other countries have had slowdowns or increases in rates of change in annual new infections. INTERPRETATION: Scale-up of ART and prevention of mother-to-child transmission has been one of the great successes of global health in the past two decades. However, in the past decade, progress in reducing new infections has been slow, development assistance for health devoted to HIV has stagnated, and resources for health in low-income countries have grown slowly. Achievement of the new ambitious goals for HIV enshrined in Sustainable Development Goal 3 and the 90-90-90 UNAIDS targets will be challenging, and will need continued efforts from governments and international agencies in the next 15 years to end AIDS by 2030. ; Funding: We thank the countless individuals who have contributed to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2015 in various capacities. We specifically thank Jeffrey Eaton and John Stover. HW and CJLM received funding for this study from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health (NIH; R01MH110163); and the National Institute on Aging, NIH (P30AG047845). LJAR acknowledges the support of Qatar National Research Fund (NPRP 04-924-3-251) who provided the main funding for generating the data provided to the GBD-Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation effort. BPAQ acknowledges institutional support from PRONABEC (National Program of Scholarship and Educational Loan), provided by the Peruvian government. DB is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (grant number OPP1068048). JDN was supported in his contribution to this work by a Fellowship from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Portugal (SFRH/BPD/92934/2013). KD is supported by a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Public Health and Tropical Medicine (grant number 099876). TF received financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF; project number P300P3-154634). AG acknowledges funding from Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de Panama-SNI. PJ is supported by Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Clinical and Public Health Intermediate Fellowship. MK receives research support from the Academy of Finland, the Swedish Research Council, Alzheimerfonden, Alzheimer's Research & Prevention Foundation, Center for Innovative Medicine (CIMED) at Karolinska Institutet South Campus, AXA Research Fund, Wallenberg Clinical Scholars Award from the Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Foundation, and the Sheika Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. AK's work was supported by the Miguel Servet contract financed by the CP13/00150 and PI15/00862 projects, integrated into the National R&D&I and funded by the ISCIII (General Branch Evaluation and Promotion of Health Research), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF-FEDER). SML is funded by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinician Scientist Fellowship (grant number NIHR/CS/010/014). HJL reports grants from the NIHR, EU Innovative Medicines Initiative, Centre for Strategic & International Studies, and WHO. WM is Program analyst, Population and Development, in the Peru Country Office of the United Nations Population Fund, which does not necessarily endorse this study. For UOM, funding from the German National Cohort Consortium (O1ER1511D) is gratefully acknowledged. KR reports grants from NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, NIHR Career Development Fellowship, and Oxford Martin School during the conduct of the study. GR acknowledges that work related to this paper has been done on the behalf of the GBD Genitourinary Disease Expert Group supported by the International Society of Nephrology (ISN). ISS reports grants from FAPESP (Brazilian public agency). RSS receives institutional support from Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas y Ambientales, UDCA, Bogota Colombia. SS receives postdoctoral funding from the Fonds de la recherche en sante du Quebec (FRSQ), including its renewal. RTS was supported in part by grant number PROMETEOII/2015/021 from Generalitat Valenciana and the national grant PI14/00894 from ISCIII-FEDER. PY acknowledges support from Strategic Public Policy Research (HKU7003-SPPR-12).
Background: timely assessment of the burden of HIV/AIDS is essential for policy setting and programme evaluation. In this report from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015), we provide national estimates of levels and trends of HIV/AIDS incidence, prevalence, coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART), and mortality for 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. Methods: for countries without high-quality vital registration data, we estimated prevalence and incidence with data from antenatal care clinics and population-based seroprevalence surveys, and with assumptions by age and sex on initial CD4 distribution at infection, CD4 progression rates (probability of progression from higher to lower CD4 cell-count category), on and off antiretroviral therapy (ART) mortality, and mortality from all other causes. Our estimation strategy links the GBD 2015 assessment of all-cause mortality and estimation of incidence and prevalence so that for each draw from the uncertainty distribution all assumptions used in each step are internally consistent. We estimated incidence, prevalence, and death with GBD versions of the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP) and Spectrum software originally developed by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). We used an open-source version of EPP and recoded Spectrum for speed, and used updated assumptions from systematic reviews of the literature and GBD demographic data. For countries with high-quality vital registration data, we developed the cohort incidence bias adjustment model to estimate HIV incidence and prevalence largely from the number of deaths caused by HIV recorded in cause-of-death statistics. We corrected these statistics for garbage coding and HIV misclassification. Findings: global HIV incidence reached its peak in 1997, at 3·3 million new infections (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1–3·4 million). Annual incidence has stayed relatively constant at about 2·6 million per year (range 2·5–2·8 million) since 2005, after a period of fast decline between 1997 and 2005. The number of people living with HIV/AIDS has been steadily increasing and reached 38·8 million (95% UI 37·6–40·4 million) in 2015. At the same time, HIV/AIDS mortality has been declining at a steady pace, from a peak of 1·8 million deaths (95% UI 1·7–1·9 million) in 2005, to 1·2 million deaths (1·1–1·3 million) in 2015. We recorded substantial heterogeneity in the levels and trends of HIV/AIDS across countries. Although many countries have experienced decreases in HIV/AIDS mortality and in annual new infections, other countries have had slowdowns or increases in rates of change in annual new infections. Interpretation: scale-up of ART and prevention of mother-to-child transmission has been one of the great successes of global health in the past two decades. However, in the past decade, progress in reducing new infections has been slow, development assistance for health devoted to HIV has stagnated, and resources for health in low-income countries have grown slowly. Achievement of the new ambitious goals for HIV enshrined in Sustainable Development Goal 3 and the 90-90-90 UNAIDS targets will be challenging, and will need continued efforts from governments and international agencies in the next 15 years to end AIDS by 2030. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health
Background Timely assessment of the burden of HIV/AIDS is essential for policy setting and programme evaluation. In this report from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (GBD 2015), we provide national estimates of levels and trends of HIV/AIDS incidence, prevalence, coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART), and mortality for 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. Methods For countries without high-quality vital registration data, we estimated prevalence and incidence with data from antenatal care clinics and population-based seroprevalence surveys, and with assumptions by age and sex on initial CD4 distribution at infection, CD4 progression rates (probability of progression from higher to lower CD4 cell-count category), on and off antiretroviral therapy (ART) mortality, and mortality from all other causes. Our estimation strategy links the GBD 2015 assessment of all-cause mortality and estimation of incidence and prevalence so that for each draw from the uncertainty distribution all assumptions used in each step are internally consistent. We estimated incidence, prevalence, and death with GBD versions of the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP) and Spectrum software originally developed by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). We used an open-source version of EPP and recoded Spectrum for speed, and used updated assumptions from systematic reviews of the literature and GBD demographic data. For countries with high-quality vital registration data, we developed the cohort incidence bias adjustment model to estimate HIV incidence and prevalence largely from the number of deaths caused by HIV recorded in cause-of-death statistics. We corrected these statistics for garbage coding and HIV misclassification. Findings Global HIV incidence reached its peak in 1997, at 3.3 million new infections (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3.1-3.4 million). Annual incidence has stayed relatively constant at about 2.6 million per year (range 2.5-2.8 million) since 2005, after a period of fast decline between 1997 and 2005. The number of people living with HIV/AIDS has been steadily increasing and reached 38.8 million (95% UI 37.6-40.4 million) in 2015. At the same time, HIV/AIDS mortality has been declining at a steady pace, from a peak of 1.8 million deaths (95% UI 1.7-1.9 million) in 2005, to 1.2 million deaths (1.1-1.3 million) in 2015. We recorded substantial heterogeneity in the levels and trends of HIV/AIDS across countries. Although many countries have experienced decreases in HIV/AIDS mortality and in annual new infections, other countries have had slowdowns or increases in rates of change in annual new infections. Interpretation Scale-up of ART and prevention of mother-to-child transmission has been one of the great successes of global health in the past two decades. However, in the past decade, progress in reducing new infections has been slow, development assistance for health devoted to HIV has stagnated, and resources for health in low-income countries have grown slowly. Achievement of the new ambitious goals for HIV enshrined in Sustainable Development Goal 3 and the 90-90-90 UNAIDS targets will be challenging, and will need continued efforts from governments and international agencies in the next 15 years to end AIDS by 2030. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY license
BACKGROUND:Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) involves all people receiving the health services they need, of high quality, without experiencing financial hardship. Making progress towards UHC is a policy priority for both countries and global institutions, as highlighted by the agenda of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and WHO's Thirteenth General Programme of Work (GPW13). Measuring effective coverage at the health-system level is important for understanding whether health services are aligned with countries' health profiles and are of sufficient quality to produce health gains for populations of all ages. METHODS:Based on the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019, we assessed UHC effective coverage for 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2019. Drawing from a measurement framework developed through WHO's GPW13 consultation, we mapped 23 effective coverage indicators to a matrix representing health service types (eg, promotion, prevention, and treatment) and five population-age groups spanning from reproductive and newborn to older adults (≥65 years). Effective coverage indicators were based on intervention coverage or outcome-based measures such as mortality-to-incidence ratios to approximate access to quality care; outcome-based measures were transformed to values on a scale of 0-100 based on the 2·5th and 97·5th percentile of location-year values. We constructed the UHC effective coverage index by weighting each effective coverage indicator relative to its associated potential health gains, as measured by disability-adjusted life-years for each location-year and population-age group. For three tests of validity (content, known-groups, and convergent), UHC effective coverage index performance was generally better than that of other UHC service coverage indices from WHO (ie, the current metric for SDG indicator 3.8.1 on UHC service coverage), the World Bank, and GBD 2017. We quantified frontiers of UHC effective coverage performance on the basis of pooled health spending per capita, representing UHC effective coverage index levels achieved in 2019 relative to country-level government health spending, prepaid private expenditures, and development assistance for health. To assess current trajectories towards the GPW13 UHC billion target-1 billion more people benefiting from UHC by 2023-we estimated additional population equivalents with UHC effective coverage from 2018 to 2023. FINDINGS:Globally, performance on the UHC effective coverage index improved from 45·8 (95% uncertainty interval 44·2-47·5) in 1990 to 60·3 (58·7-61·9) in 2019, yet country-level UHC effective coverage in 2019 still spanned from 95 or higher in Japan and Iceland to lower than 25 in Somalia and the Central African Republic. Since 2010, sub-Saharan Africa showed accelerated gains on the UHC effective coverage index (at an average increase of 2·6% [1·9-3·3] per year up to 2019); by contrast, most other GBD super-regions had slowed rates of progress in 2010-2019 relative to 1990-2010. Many countries showed lagging performance on effective coverage indicators for non-communicable diseases relative to those for communicable diseases and maternal and child health, despite non-communicable diseases accounting for a greater proportion of potential health gains in 2019, suggesting that many health systems are not keeping pace with the rising non-communicable disease burden and associated population health needs. In 2019, the UHC effective coverage index was associated with pooled health spending per capita (r=0·79), although countries across the development spectrum had much lower UHC effective coverage than is potentially achievable relative to their health spending. Under maximum efficiency of translating health spending into UHC effective coverage performance, countries would need to reach $1398 pooled health spending per capita (US$ adjusted for purchasing power parity) in order to achieve 80 on the UHC effective coverage index. From 2018 to 2023, an estimated 388·9 million (358·6-421·3) more population equivalents would have UHC effective coverage, falling well short of the GPW13 target of 1 billion more people benefiting from UHC during this time. Current projections point to an estimated 3·1 billion (3·0-3·2) population equivalents still lacking UHC effective coverage in 2023, with nearly a third (968·1 million [903·5-1040·3]) residing in south Asia. INTERPRETATION:The present study demonstrates the utility of measuring effective coverage and its role in supporting improved health outcomes for all people-the ultimate goal of UHC and its achievement. Global ambitions to accelerate progress on UHC service coverage are increasingly unlikely unless concerted action on non-communicable diseases occurs and countries can better translate health spending into improved performance. Focusing on effective coverage and accounting for the world's evolving health needs lays the groundwork for better understanding how close-or how far-all populations are in benefiting from UHC. FUNDING:Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.