all of these surprising statistics come from one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors ever attempted. a project that s been compared to the human genome project. it s called the global burden of disease study, a gargantuan effort to track just about every death around the world involving more than 1,000 investigators and covering 188 countries. for comparison, the u.n. has 193 member states. the project is chronicled in a book that came out recently called epic measures: one doctor, 7 billion patients by jeremy n. smith. dr. christopher murray, the public health guru behind the project, realized that to fight disease and death around the world more effectively, health care officials needed to know exactly what was killing and hurting the humans on planet earth. so he and his team are grabbing every bit of data they can get their hands on, a case of moneyball meets medicine, as smith notes.
it was air pollution inside people s homes from cooking. so rwanda gave out 1 million clean cooking stoves to those most in need. china approved tougher protections for the environment after global burden of disease experts showed how outdoor air pollution was partly responsible for 1.2 million deaths in 2010. and the author, jeremy smith, says that after iran found out that traffic accidents were a leading preventable cause of health loss, iran ordered new roads to be built and retrained its police force. we ve all heard about the rise of big data and how it will have big effects. well, this is the ultimate big data project, and it could indeed save lives and money big time. next on gps, is it possible to understand the most repressive, secretive nation in the world? we re going to try. author blaine harden takes us deep inside north korea. why do we do it? why do we spend every waking moment, thinking about people?
and covering 188 countries. for comparison, the u.n. has 193 member states. the project is chronicled in a book that came out recently called epic measures: one doctor, 7 billion patients by jeremy n. smith. dr. christopher murray, the public health guru behind the project, realized that to fight disease and death around the world more effectively, health care officials needed to know exactly what was killing and hurting the humans on planet earth. so he and his team are grabbing every bit of data they can get their hands on, a case of moneyball meets medicine, as smith notes. what s interesting about their latest report on 2013 is that there were huge variations among different countries when you look at causes of death. for example, three persian gulf states, the uae, saudi arabia, and oman, had very high road injury death rates.