Measuring the Global Burden of Disease - Philosophical Dimensions

• Identifies and discusses a range of ethical and philosophical issues connected to the GBD, one of the largest and most important epidemiological studies ever undertaken
• Sheds light on how to interpret and best use epidemiological data and provides a roadmap for future efforts to refine the GBD and other epidemiological studies
• Offers an unusually deep philosophical analysis of a single scientific undertaking
• Includes contributors from a wide range of disciplines: philosophy, economics, epidemiology, policy

The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) is one of the largest-scale research collaborations in global health, distilling a wide range of health information to provide estimates and projections for more than 350 diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 195 countries. Its results are a critical tool informing researchers, policy-makers, and others working to promote health around the globe.

A study like the GBD is, of course, extremely complex from an empirical perspective. But it also raises a large number of complex ethical and philosophical questions that have been explored in a series of collaborations over the past twenty years among epidemiologists, philosophers, economists, and policy scholars. The essays in this volume address issues of current and urgent concern to the GBD and other epidemiological studies, including rival understandings of causation, the aggregation of complex health data, temporal discounting, age-weighting, and the valuation of health states. The volume concludes with a set of chapters discussing how epidemiological data should and should not be used.

Better appreciating the philosophical dimensions of a study like the GBD can make possible a more sophisticated interpretation of its results, and it can improve epidemiological studies in the future, so that they are better suited to produce results that can help us to improve global health.

Table of Contents

Part I: Background and Basics
1. Introduction: Philosophy and the Global Burden of Disease Study - N. Eyal, S. Hurst, C.J.L. Murray, S.A. Schroeder, D. Wikler
2. GBD: the basics - T. Vos
3. Ethical Dimensions of the Global Burden of Disease - C.J.L. Murray, S.A. Schroeder
Part II: Measuring Health, Valuing Health
4. Can Health Be Measured? - D. Hausman
5. Health Can Be Measured: Weighing Disability in the Global Burden of Disease - J. Salomon
6. Does GBD 2010 Succeed in Measuring Health? - D. Hausman
7. Extended Preference and the Valuation of Health - M.D. Adler
8. Equivalent Income and the Well-Being Burden of Disease - E. Schokkaert
9. Years of Good Life Based on Consumption and Health: A Practical Wellbeing Metric for Economic Evaluation - R. Cookson, O. Cotton-Barratt, M. Adler, M. Asaria, T. Ord
10. Values, Politics, and Health-Measurement - E. Kingma
Part III: Causation
11. Causal Attribution, Counterfactuals, and Disease Interventions - J. Woodward
12. Causal Contribution - N. Hall
Part IV: Values and Measures of Health
13. To Discount or Not to Discount? - M. Fleurbaey, S. Zuber
14. Discounting for Uncertainty in Health - O. Cotton-Barratt
15. Age and Time in the Measurement of the Burden of Disease - G. Bognar
Part V: Uses of GBD Data
16. Healthy Nails versus Long Lives: An Analysis of a Dutch Priority-Setting Proposal - A. Voorhoeve
17. The Uses of Burden of Disease Data for Priority Setting - T. Ottersen, O.F. Norheim
18. The Global Health Impact Index - N. Hassoun