Global disease patterns

This section of the course aims to provide you with the opportunity to find out about health in a particular country, or region, and about major disease categories facing populations in the world.  After completion of this section, you should be able to:

• assess the global burden and patterns of diseases in different countries and how they are changing over time
• identify some of the challenges in the prevention and control of major communicable and non-communicable diseases in resources limited settings

When considering the Public Health aspects of an disease, we usually try to explore the burden of the disease on the population, the causes (by understanding the epidemiology and social and cultural determinants) and the evidence base to allow treatment and prevention and control that will reduce the burden of disease. In this introduction to disease in developing countries, we can only briefly touch on some of these aspects, and have chosen to explore in this section issues relating to the burden of disease and some aspects of prevention and control; we will not be discussing treatment options.

Prevention and control. Right at the start of this section, it is worth thinking about interventions for global control and prevention programs (we will discuss how to evaluate these in the next section of this course). The most well known global initiatives are the Sustainable Development Goals which replaced the widely acclaimed Millennium Development Goals (the UN site Millennium Development Goals 2015 and beyond is still available as a gateway to information about the MDGs). Many of the SDGs have a health component. You may find 'Real-time briefings on sustainable development and humanitarian action' of interest.