Measuring Morbidity

Measuring Schistosomiasis Morbidity

In order to make headway in the control of morbidity we must try to answer the following questions: what do we define as schistosomiasis related morbidity, how do we measure it, what is the impact of the detected morbidity on the health of affected communities, what other factors might influence the level of morbidity in an endemic setting, and how can we measure the impact of treatment or inte...

Measuring morbidity for resource allocation.

The RAWP (Resource Allocation Working Party) report used population weightings based on standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) as a proxy measure of differences in morbidity (and therefore in the need for health care resources) that existed between geographical areas after allowing for the age and sex structure of their populations. The adequacy of SMRs as a proxy for morbidity has aroused contro...

Measuring maternal health: focus on maternal morbidity.

The challenge of measuring multi-morbidity and its costs

The ageing of the population across developed countries and beyond has increased the importance of examining multi-morbidity. The recent paper by Arbelle et al. [Isr J of Health Policy Res. 2014;3:29] on multiple chronic conditions in Israel's Maccabi Health Care System (MHC) is a welcome and interesting contribution to the literature on this topic. They found that the prevalence of multiple ch...

Asking the Right Questions: Morbidity, Mortality, and Measuring What’s Important in Unbiased Evaluations of Antimicrobials

In this issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Prasad et al present a meta-analysis of 13 randomized trials comparing outcomes of tigecycline with control antimicrobials [1]. Their results show an absolute mortality increase of 0.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], .1–1.2) with tigecycline, translating into 1 excess death for every 143 patients treated (95% CI, 83– 1000). The estimates of increas...