Research Resource: World Health Statistics 2022 Published, Report and Dataset Available Online

From the World Health Organization:

The World Health Organization has published its latest comprehensive set of World Health Statistics to 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic – which led to an estimated 4.5 million excess deaths in that year.

The statistics reveal the extent to which the pandemic has been affecting health systems worldwide, in some cases severely curtailing access to vital services. These disruptions are likely to set back global progress on both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy made in the first 20 years of the century.

Global life expectancy at birth had increased from 66.8 years in 2000 to 73.3 years in 2019, and healthy life expectancy increased from 58.3 years to 63.7 years. This was largely due to gains in maternal and child health, and to major investments and improvements in communicable disease programmes, such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. But the 2020 data shows how service disruptions contributed to an increase in deaths from tuberculosis and malaria between 2019 and 2020.

Prior to the pandemic, there had also been encouraging trends globally in the reduction of child stunting, alcohol consumption and tobacco use, as well as in increased access to safely managed drinking water, safely managed sanitation, basic hygiene, and clean fuels and technologies for cooking.

These advances had been partly underpinned by a doubling in global spending on health between 2000 and 2019, reaching 9.8% of global gross domestic product. But approximately 80% of that spending occurred in high-income countries, the bulk of it (about 70%) coming from government budgets. In low-income countries, out-of-pocket spending was the main source of health expenditure (44%), followed by external aid (29%).

Direct to Full Text Report and Data File

Direct to Complete Publication Announcement

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, News