Disease Control Priorities, 3rd edition: improving health and reducing poverty.

www.thelancet.com Published online February 5, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60097-6 1 In 1993 the World Bank published the fi rst edition of Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP1), an attempt to systematically assess the cost-eff ectiveness of interventions for the major sources of disease burden in low-income and middle-income countries. World Bank staff in the early 1990s were just beginning to receive requests from countries to fi nance projects to control AIDS and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). A major motivation for DCP1 was thus to identify reasonable responses in resource-constrained environments to the emergence of AIDS and to the growing burden of NCDs. The World Bank’s fi rst (and so far only) World Development Report dealing with health drew on fi ndings from DCP1 both to conclude that a number of specifi c interventions against AIDS and against NCDs, including tobacco control, were attractive and to underscore the cost-eff ectiveness of immunisation and the treatment of childhood infections. Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition (DCP2), published in 2006, updated and extended DCP1 in several aspects, notably to explicitly consider implications for health systems of expanded intervention coverage. One way health systems achieve expanded intervention coverage is through investing in platforms that deliver interventions that require similar logistics, but which address heterogeneous health problems (table). Platforms often provide a more natural unit for investment than do individual interventions. For this reason, analysis of the costs of providing platforms—and of health improvements they can generate in a given epidemiological environment—can often provide a more helpful guide to health-system investments than can analysis only of interventions. Platforms examined included the district hospital as a whole, the surgical and emergency room platforms within the district hospital, and school-based health programmes. Both DCP1 and DCP2 also stimulated and informed specifi c country-level analyses, for example, in India. Disease Control Priorities, 3rd edition: improving health and reducing poverty