Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

bounce based on what we've seen in the United Kingdom but as we'll see in a minute the official data well the best predictive data is not really showing that so the United States may well be basically out of this pandemic now.

US deaths now they're still high that's the thousand a day line there so they are going down and and the projections are that these deaths will carry on going down they've taken a while but they are going down hospital patients likewise in the states also also going down really really quite significantly and have been for some time and again that's predicted to continue Now, we're just going to look at some of the predictive data on the United States from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which Washington State hosted, of course.

And here we have that here.

Now, this is the first one, daily infections and testing.

So basically they're predicting that that carries on going.

down so that's um that's interesting and here we see the actual uh daily infections and daily infections so these are infections as opposed to cases and we see they're much higher so they peaked there because we're on a different scale here so that they pink they peak there at four million uh per day uh now uh down here and again these are actual infections remember And of course, the diagnosed cases are just a subset of these actual infections predicted to carry on going down.

So interestingly, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is not anticipating a BA2 increase, which I must say, surprised me.

I have been expecting it based on the UK data, based on the Danish data, but they're not.

One of the more unusual stories that happened last week was an article published in The Lancet, which is the holy grail of scientific journals, and referring to Professor Christopher J.L. Murray, was talking about an assessment of the major threats facing humanity over the coming decades.

Now, the man himself, he's not a hoax, he's Professor Murray, he's Director of the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation at the University of Washington and co-chair of the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Health Threats.

He leads the Global Burden of Disease Research Collaboration.

Now, the principal findings of this assessment, this is where we get into the weeds, nuclear war and AI misuse stand as the biggest, posing major hazards and threats to humanity, potentially existential threats, nuclear war and AI misuse.

Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

I'm Rhonda Stewart.

In this episode, we'll hear from Dr. Emanuela Mwako, winner of the 2026 Roux Prize.

Known affectionately to her patients as Dr. Ella, she's a pediatric oncologist advancing childhood cancer care in Ghana.

The Roo Prize, supported by David and Barbara Roo and awarded by IHME, recognizes a person who has used health evidence in bold ways to make people healthier and includes a $100,000 award.

Childhood cancer survival exceeds 80% in many high-income countries, compared with less than 30% in many African settings.

As lead pediatric oncologist at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, Dr. Mwako established a shared care pediatric oncology service in 2019, bringing treatment closer to families who had traveled up to nine hours to reach specialist care.

I believe it's going to open doors to even bigger things.

It's a difficult reality to face.

The data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation within this report proves that the burden of disease and injury between 2025 and 2100 amounts to an estimated $246 billion.

We know how to prevent it.

But the gap between what we have the technical capacity to prevent and what our political incentive structures will actually allow us to prevent remains a massive chasm.

Rhonda Stewart Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

I'm Rhonda Stewart.

In this episode, we'll hear from Dr. Chris Murray, director of IHME and co-chair of the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health.

The commission assessed threats to health over a 75-year horizon, from 2025 to 2100, and identified 17 catastrophic threats, including two with extinction potential, malicious use of AI and nuclear conflict.

Rather than focusing on worst-case scenarios, the Commission measured each threat's amenable burden, the difference in healthy years of life between a plausible best and plausible worst future.

And so we can talk about what public health should be doing, which is warning people of the long term and chronic dangers of each SARS-CoV-2 infection.

They should be calling for broad group-based as opposed to individual-based precautions.

They should be advocating for free and discounted mitigation so that people don't have to pay to get their boosters.

People can get access to high quality well-fitting masks without having to pay to do so.

the implications stretch well beyond the individual.

So according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the global burden of disease has risen steadily since 1990 as populations age and chronic conditions have become more prevalent.

So for healthcare systems facing mounting costs, this reinforces the immense value of technologies that can help prevent diseases and extend healthy years of life.

It is a proactive rather than a reactive approach to global health.

Rhonda Stewart Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

I'm Rhonda Stewart.

In this episode, we'll hear from IHME Director Dr. Chris Murray about a $540 million 10-year investment from the Gates Foundation and what it means for health evidence as a global public good.

The investment will support IHME's three flagship research areas, the Global Burden of Disease Study, also known as GBD, IHME's Future Health Scenarios Forecasting Platform, and its tracking of financing for global health.

Knowledge about what harms health and what works to improve it benefits everyone.

Over the next decade, GBD will expand from about 925 locations to nearly 5,000, with estimates at the state or provincial level in every country.

This more detailed view can reveal health disparities that national averages hide.

IHME's work is carried out with a network of more than 20,000 collaborators in approximately 150 countries.

A couple of tipping points really mattered here.

The first was there is a global public health kind of data analysis shop called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations.

And I forget the exact year, but around 2015, they included lead poisoning in an analysis product of theirs called the Global Burden of Disease Analysis.

The Global Burden of Disease basically looks at what killed everyone who died and what was the risk factor that led to that cause of death.