Videos

Bayesian population reconstruction is a method for estimating past populations by age with fully probabilistic statements of uncertainty. It simultaneously estimates age-specific population counts, vital rates, and net migration from fragmentary data while formally accounting for measurement error. As inputs, it takes bias-reduced initial estimates of age-specific population counts, vital rates and net migration, and expert opinion about measurement error informed by data where available. We describe the new approach in the context of existing methods and demonstrate its flexibility by showing that it works well in countries with widely varying levels of data quality by applying it to very different countries, namely Laos and New Zealand. Remaining challenges and future directions will be discussed.

Countries in the Arab world -- from Saudi Arabia to Mauritania to Yemen -- have made some significant health gains over the past two decades, including increases in life expectancy and swift reductions in child mortality. But the rise of chronic diseases, diet-related risk factors, and deaths from road injuries during the same period threatens that progress.

When a risk factor for poor health affects one part of a community more than another, policymakers have two choices: continue with a one-size-fits-all approach or find a new way to focus on the population most at risk.

This seminar reports on reproductive history interviews with 1,014 Tibetan women 40 years of age and older living at altitudes of 3,000+ meters in Gorkha and Mustang Districts, Nepal, as well as on ethnographic data from the regions. 

This talk will cover key findings from perception studies and visualization research and will examine techniques for evaluating and understanding visualizations.

Stein Emil Vollset will give an overview of what is known and what remains to be learned about health, disease, and risk factors in Norway.

In countries with limited vital registration, adult mortality rates are frequently estimated using siblings’ survival histories (SSH) collected during nationally representative surveys such as the Demographic and Health Surveys. Such data may underestimate adult mortality because of reporting errors and omissions of deceased siblings. Dr. Helleringer and fellow researchers developed a new SSH questionnaire, the siblings’ life calendar (SLC), which incorporates recall cues designed to limit omissions of siblings and uses a life calendar approach to improve the reporting of dates and ages. They tested whether the SLC improved the quality and completeness of death reports in SSH during a randomized controlled trial in Niakhar (Senegal).

IHME’s Director of Data Development Peter Speyer gave a talk at TEDxRainier, Seattle’s annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) event.

Dr. Jewell’s arrival as an Assistant Professor at Berkeley in 1981 coincided with the peak of the HIV epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area. From that moment on he was involved in many studies of the epidemiology of AIDS and subsequently intervention and treatment trials. He will discuss some of the statistical challenges associated with population studies of HIV and how methods developed to study the epidemic turned out to have much broader application.

Many health behaviors are difficult to measure. Estimates of illegal drug use are subject to substantial self-report and sampling biases. Municipal wastewater samples are routinely collected for 24-hour periods at the point of inflow to treatment plants, providing insights into substance consumption upstream that is anonymous, near real time, and relatively inexpensive. Analytic chemistry can identify specific compounds at the level of parts per billion in wastewater with very good accuracy and precision. Findings from several large-scale sampling campaigns across the Northwest for prescription and illegal drugs of abuse will be shared. Approaches to dealing with measurement and analytical issues including measuring actual population in a municipality in a 24-hour period will be discussed. The possibilities and limits of this approach for other health behaviors will be discussed.

This talk will highlight some of the benefits and challenges associated with harnessing the temporal structure present in many datasets.

Founder and CEO of Captricity, Kuang Chen, demonstrates Captricity and discusses ways to incorporate paper-based data into organizational workflows by transforming static data into structured, machine-readable formats for analysis, reporting, and other uses.

This video infographic, produced by The Lancet, spotlights the burden of mental and substance use disorders worldwide.

Global Health Metrics and Evaluation (GHME) Conference2013

Global Health Metrics and Evaluation Conference (GHME) 2013