How better data on death can improve lives

“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.

“The really big concern, is that three or four decades ago, Australians began to become obese in large numbers, and now we have one in three Australian adults clinically obese. About another one in three are overweight.

“Both of those categories carry significant excess risk of death, primarily from major vascular disease, like heart attacks and stroke, but also from some cancers. Those death rates for cardiovascular disease are no longer declining. In fact in Australia, they are, or are about to rise.

Professor Lopez says it isn’t an outrageous contention, that life expectancy for the generation born in the last 10, or 20, or 30 years, will be lower than their mothers and fathers.

“That, I think, is a major public health concern. We have achieved a lot of what we’re going to achieve in terms of mortality reduction through smoking control, but there’s still more to be done.”

Episode recorded: June 18, 2020.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-production: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Banner: Getty Images.