Eavesdrop On Experts

“You don’t know what health problems a population has unless you can measure them, and that’s what I try to do,” says Alan Lopez, Laureate Professor of Global Health at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. “If you’re going to improve a population’s health, then you need to know which are the leading causes of death, and particularly which ones are increasing so that you can match interventions to those health problems,” he says. Professor Lopez specialises in descriptive epidemiology, which looks at not the causes, but the measurement of disease and mortality patterns in populations. He says getting the measurement right on lung cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, measles, TB or road traffic accidents, matters a lot to health policy. “If you can demonstrate that death rates from a particular condition or disease are rising rapidly, or falling rapidly, then you’re either doing something wrong, or something right and policy can be calibrated according to that knowledge