Globally, the incidence of communicable diseases has decreased compared to non-communicable diseases. However, chronic communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis persist worldwide. Furthermore, emerging new infections such as H1N1 influenza pose a new threat to public health. However, most studies have focused on non-communicable diseases because of their increasing incidence, with...

BACKGROUND Implementing organizations are pressured to be accountable for performance. Many health impact metrics present limitations for priority setting; they do not permit comparisons across different interventions or health areas. In response, Population Services International (PSI) adopted the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted as its bottom-line performance metric. While interna...

Background: Iran is located in Asian esophageal cancer belt, with age-standardized incidence rate (ASR) of approximately 7 per 100,000 for both men and women. To provide potential solution recommendations for achieving accurate estimations regarding the burden of the disease in Iran, we designed a study to assess the burden of esophageal cancer in Iran during 1995-2015 by collecting data from t...

Background: Water, sanitation and hygiene have a very important role in public health. Poor sanitation is the cause of water contamination, which causes many types of diseases. The aim of this paper was to present the attributable death and disability adjusted life year (DALYs) of untreated water and insanitary environments from 1990 to 2010 in Iran.   Methods: In the Global Burden of D...

The calculation of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) enables public health policy makers to compare the burden of disease of a specific disease with that of other (infectious) diseases. The incidence of a disease is important for the calculation of DALYs. To estimate the incidence of congenital toxoplasmosis (CT), a random sample of 10,008 dried blood spot filter paper cards from babies bo...

Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) were developed as a health gap measure to quantify the burden of disease and injury on human populations for the Global Burden of Disease Study (Murray 1996). Murray and Acharya (1997) have reviewed the specific formulation of DALYs and the arguments underpinning the social values explicitly incorporated into DALYs. This paper summarizes the arguments supp...

BACKGROUND Country comparisons that consider the effect of fatal and non-fatal disease outcomes are needed for health-care planning. We calculated disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) to estimate the global burden of cancer in 2008. METHODS We used population-based data, mostly from cancer registries, for incidence, mortality, life expectancy, disease duration, and age at onset and death, a...

Aim: The European region is facing major health challenges attributable to noncommunicable diseases. Non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of premature mortality in Europe. This paper aims to indicate how Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) attributable to tobacco smoking, alcohol use and diet have changed over the past 20 years in Albania and Greece. Moreover, the paper discusses ...

BACKGROUND Lack of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) incidence data in (Norwegian) high-risk groups impedes the ability to make informed decisions on prevention measures. Thus we rely on modelling to estimate the incidence and burden of HCV infections. METHODS We constructed a compartmental model for HCV infections in Norway among active and former people who inject drugs (PWIDs). We based yearly trans...