Measuring the Global Burden of Disease

Book excerpt: "In this volume, a group of leading philosophers, economists, epidemiologists, and policy scholars continue a twenty-year discussion of philosophical questions connected to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), one of the largest-scale research collaborations in global health. Chapters explore issues in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of economics, and the philosophy of medicine. Some chapters identify previously-unappreciated aspects of the GBD, including the way it handles causation and aggregates complex data; while others offer fresh perspectives on frequently-discussed topics such as discounting, age-weighting, and the valuation of health states. The volume concludes with a set of chapters discussing how epidemiological data should and shouldn't be used"--