NEW YORK (Reuters) - Infectious diseases have grabbed too much of the global health-dollar pie, say United Nations health experts, while research on bigger threats such as tobacco, mental health, and accidents are starved for funds.
According to the current issue of New Scientist, a report from the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) says mortality figures have misled WHO officials into concentrating resources in the wrong areas.
"This report is really a breakthrough in terms of reshaping the priority order of health issues," said Claude Romer, head of safety promotion and injury control at the WHO.
The U.N. 'top ten' list of health priorities is being shaken up. Romer says too much time and money was going towards emerging infectious diseases (such as the Ebola virus), which grab headlines but are minor killers in terms of numbers.
Instead, the report says mental illness has emerged as the #1 threat to health worldwide, followed by other noncommunicable problems like smoking and traffic accidents.
Mental illness will be the most debilitating health problem in the developing world by the year 2020, according to the WHO study.
"These figures are a wake-up call," according to report committee chairman Dean Jamison, a professor of public health at University of California Los Angeles. "If we see serious changes of allocation of funds, then we'll know our analysis has made a difference."
It was the WHO's new system of determining the real costs of accident and illness that led to the changes. Instead of relying on the usual mortality figures, the report committee devised a new yardstick called DALY -- the Disability-Adjusted Life Year. It assesses not only deaths, but the long-term sickness and disability caused by all manner of assaults on the body.
"If you don't use a disability weighting, you get into silliness because you pay no attention to, say, psychiatric illness or half the burden of road traffic accidents," Jamison explained. "Just using deaths by cause doesn't take notice of this."
Under the DALY system, the worldwide profile of mental illness has increased dramatically. In previous studies, its impact was measured only by suicide rates.
While noncommunicable diseases get more attention, former 'star' diseases like tuberculosis (TB), polio, and Ebola may see their luster fade. Some of this might be blamed on the previous over-reporting of deaths from these diseases. For example, the annual global death count from TB has been adjusted in the new DALY stats down from 3 million to 2 million.
And the report says the search for improving existing vaccines or treatments for infectious disease is draining funds away from ailments which might need research dollars more urgently. One case is the money being poured into the search for a better vaccine for polio -- a relatively minor threat now -- while pneumonia vaccine research goes without needed funds. Pneumonia is one of the world's most lethal infections in terms of sheer numbers of people affected.
The full report will be released by the WHO next week.
SOURCE: New Scientist (September 14, 1996)
