Global Indicators of Health: Changes and New Facts

Global indicators of health are changing continuously among various societies, whereas an accurate awareness of these changes and related factors has not been developed yet. One of the major causes of this lack of awareness is insufficient and inaccurate transferring of statistic data. The objective of this study was reporting the changes occurred in global indicators of health and explaining the new facts using the Gapminder tool.

In this study, visual and graphical tools of Gapminder were used. Gapminder is a non-profit organization that acquires data from reliable databases and demonstrates them on diagrams on its website and application. It includes 498 public health and socio-economic indicators which are derived and updated from international institutions including World Bank, World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Global Burden of Diseases study. Gapminder provides various tools for the users. The diagrams demonstrated in this study are derived from the 2018 offline version of Gapminder and necessary alterations have been made.

In 1965, there were two peaks in the diagram of the distribution of world population based on their income. Most of the populations of the Asian countries were distributed in the low-income section of the diagram, whereas most of the populations of the European and American countries were distributed in the high-income section of the diagram. However, in 2018, there is only one peak in the middle of this diagram. This diagram in 2018 indicates that most of the world populations, regardless of their countries, live in the middle section of the diagram. Therefore, it could be concluded that in each country, there are people living in each level of the all four levels of income. The novel classification, classifies the world population based on their daily income to four levels: people with daily income of less than two dollars, two to eight dollars, eight to 32 dollars and more than 32 dollars.

The changing trend of the mentioned indicators of health is stablished. However, since nowadays the major source of awareness is media, biases of the mass media have created inaccurate awareness among people. Therefore, novel methods and tools are required to transfer accurate data about health indicators to researchers, policy makers, investors, and other members of societies. Accordingly, Gapminder has been developed to assist the observation and interpretation of global indicators of health changes. The Gapminder foundation and its software have enabled statistical data to be demonstrated more attractively and comprehensively. However, inventing and applying novel methods and tools for transferring data is not the last step in increasing public awareness regarding to changes of the health indicators. Thus, the next step would be driving a paradigm shift in mentation among people in order to adopt evidence and fact based view about the world around them.