The Unequal World of Health Data

Health data are a slippery commodity. It is not difficult to reach subjective agreement that such data are unequally distributed around the world, both in terms of quantity and quality. But objective assessments are more difficult, since they need to be based on data-and the data about the data may themselves be problematic or incomplete. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, literature is relatively scarce on the extent and quality of primary sources of health data on a global scale, even though there are many reports that present aggregated global data on various health issues 1,2, sometimes giving the impression that those estimates carry a high degree of certainty.