35 articles tagged with #public-health
Nauru has the world's highest smoking rate — 52% of adults smoke. China has more smokers than any country: 300 million people. Smoking kills 8 million people per year — more than any other preventable cause. Yet tobacco use is rising in low-income countries as it falls in wealthy ones.
Machine learning can scan news and travel data for outbreak signals, forecast cases weeks ahead, and track viral genomes. It cannot say when the next pandemic starts.
ML models are combining data from satellites, low-cost sensors, and weather systems to produce real-time air quality maps far more detailed than official monitoring networks.
From smallpox to COVID-19, vaccines are humanity's most powerful medical technology. Here's how we discovered them.
Antimicrobial resistance is rising fast. If antibiotics universally failed, common infections would kill again, surgery and chemotherapy would become extraordinarily risky, and life expectancy would drop by years. The world would resemble the medical landscape of 1925.
Libya, Thailand, and Zimbabwe have the world's highest road death rates. Globally, 1.19 million people die on roads every year — a preventable public health crisis. Norway and Sweden have achieved near-zero road death targets. Here's the data on traffic fatalities and what Vision Zero countries actually do differently.
Lesotho, Guyana, and Eswatini have the world's highest suicide rates. South Korea has the highest rate among wealthy OECD nations. Globally, nearly 800,000 people die by suicide each year — more than all wars and homicides combined. Here's what the data shows and what interventions actually work.
Ethiopia, DR Congo, and Niger have the worst access to clean drinking water — fewer than 50% of the population has access. 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water globally. Waterborne diseases kill 1.5 million people annually. A child dies every 2 minutes from diarrheal disease linked to unsafe water.
Australia, the Netherlands and the UK top the Commonwealth Fund's 2024 comparison of ten wealthy health systems, while the US ranks last despite the highest spending. Here is how the major rankings work, what the data shows, and why 'best' depends on what you measure.
Australia has the world's highest cancer incidence rate — 468 cases per 100,000 people. Denmark leads Europe. The US ranks 5th globally. High-income countries detect more cancer but survive it better. Cancer kills 10 million people annually — the world's second-leading cause of death.
589 million adults now have diabetes — 1 in 9 globally. China has 148 million cases, the most of any country. Pakistan's age-standardised prevalence rate of 31.4% means nearly 1 in 3 adults is diabetic. The IDF's 2025 Atlas projects 853 million by 2050. Here is the full country-by-country breakdown and what drives these numbers.
The United States spent 16.7% of GDP and about $13,500 per person on health in 2023, by WHO data, far more than any other large economy. This ranking compares the top spenders by share of GDP and per capita, explains why the two measures disagree, and looks at what the extra money does and does not buy.