global health 2035, the report of the lancet commission on investing in health, laid out a bold, highly ambitious framework for making rapid progress in improving global public health outcomes. it showed that with the right health investments, the international community could achieve a “grand convergence” in global health—a reduction in avertable infectious, maternal, and child deaths down to ...

Health reforms that emphasize public health and improvements in primary care can be cost-effective measures to achieve health improvements, especially in developing countries that face severe resource constraints. In their paper “Shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000,” Gusmano et al suggest that Shanghai’s health policy-makers have been successful in...

Until recent times most deaths were caused by infectious diseases, degenerative diseases, or violence. Let us ignore violent deaths, as they can occur at any age. Infectious diseases are a threat from the day of birth and, indeed, the very young are most susceptible to their attack. People die of degenerative diseases at older ages because it usually takes time for the body to degenerate and th...

Population and Health Policies The program evaluation literature for population and health policies is in flux, with many disciplines documenting biological and behavioral linkages from fetal development to late life mortality, chronic disease, and disability, though their implications for policy remain uncertain. Both macroand microeconomics seek to understand and incorporate connections betwe...

A majority of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2007 and cities are exerting growing influence on the health of both urban and non-urban residents. Although there long has been substantial interest in the associations between city living and health, relatively little work has tried to understand how and why cities affect population health. This reflects both the number and comp...

Population health is a relatively new term, with no agreement about whether it refers to a concept of health or a field of study of health determinants. There is debate, sometimes heated, about whether population health and public health are identical or different. Discussions of population health involve many terms, such as outcomes, disparities, determinants, and risk factors, which may be us...