The World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy LifeWorld Health Organization, 2002 - 248 pages The World Health Report 2002 measures the amount of disease, disability, and health in the world today that can be attributed to some of the most important risks to human health. Even more importantly, it also calculates how much of this present burden could be avoided in the next 10 years. The World Health Report 2002 represents one of the largest research projects ever undertaken by WHO, in collaboration with experts worldwide. Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of WHO, describes this report as a wake up call to the global community. The report quantifies some of the most important risks to human health and examines a range of methods to reduce them. The ultimate goal is to help governments of all countries to lower major risks to health, and thereby raise the healthy life expectancy of their populations. The risk factors range from underweight, unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene to high blood pressure, raised cholesterol, and obesity. The report's findings give an intriguing - and alarming - insight into not just the current causes of disease and death and the factors underlying them, but also into human patterns of living and how some may be changing around the world while others remain dangerously unchanged. Dr Brundtland says: This report helps every country in the world to see what measures it can take to reduce risks and promote healthy life for its own population. |
From inside the book
Results 6-10 of 55
... potential for better health because of a lack of enlightened policies and decisions in many sectors and the tendency of health systems to allocate resources to interventions of low quality or of low efficacy related to cost . Increasing ...
... potential risks to health is al- most infinite , and the rapidly changing age struc- tures of many populations will lead to changing risk profiles in the coming decades . Poverty is an underlying determinant of many risks to health and ...
... potential of prevention . One notable exception concerns communicable diseases , since treating infected individuals can prevent further spread of infection , and hence treatment can be a method of prevention in itself . Even when the ...
... potential adversity or threat . For example , is there risk in riding a motorcycle ? In this report , the first two meanings are used . Risk is defined as a probabil- ity of an adverse health outcome , or a factor that raises this ...
... potentially of interest . To enhance com- parability across risk factors , the basis for the results in Chapter 4 is the theoretical minimum risk distribution , that is exposure levels that would yield the lowest population risk ( for ...