Global estimates of burden of disease caused by the environment and occupational risks

Shoeb Faruquee/WHO

In 2006, WHO has released a report estimating how much of global disease could be prevented through healthier environment "Preventing disease through healthy environments: towards an estimate of the global burden of disease". This work builds on previous efforts that WHO has coordinated to estimate the global estimates of burden of disease caused by 26 risk factors, published in the World Health Report 2002, in cooperation with numerous experts around the world, where five of these risk factors were environmental and six were occupational.

Health impacts have been analyzed with a comparative and internally consistent method, based on exposure distributions and exposure-risk relatiionships. Results are provided for 14 regions of the world by gender and age groups.

Only selected risk factors and health impacts have been taken into account, which are based on the strongest evidence. The sum of the estimated health impacts therefore strongly underestimates the global health impacts which are caused by the environment.

Results by risk factors for the year 2004

Nigel Bruce/WHO

• Environmental risk factors
• Occupational risk factors
• More details for specific risks factors

Tables

• Mortality
  xls, 1.44Mb
  Attributable mortality by risk factor and WHO subregion, 2004.
• DALYs
  xls, 1.44Mb
  Attributable DALYs by risk factor and WHO subregion, 2004.
• More information on the risk factor estimates for the year 2004
  Attributable burden by risk factor and disease or injury cause, by age and sex, by World Bank icnome groups and/or regions.
• Risk exposure prevalence
  xls, 243kb
  Summary prevalence of selected risk factors by region, 2004.

Related links

• Global Health Observatory: Public health and environment

Previous estimates

• Global estimates of burden of disease for the year 2000