Disease Burden - General Significance

General Significance

In environmental health research, focus has moved from relatively simple to more complex issues. Environmental health impact assessment has turned into a valuable tool for decision support. These types of assessments increasingly use so-called environmental burden of disease (EBD) measures to express health impacts. The EBD can be seen as the gap – caused by environmental factors – between current health status and an alternative situation in which environmental exposures are reduced or eliminated. Burden of disease evaluation enable comparison of environmental health problems. This successively enables policy makers to set priorities.

There are several other good reasons for performing EBD studies, such as:

• Answer the following questions:
  • How much disease is caused by climate change?
  • How much could be avoided by making possible reductions in the exposure (avoidable burden of disease)?

• Develop, evaluate and prioritize health-related policy measures.
• Prioritizing actions in health and the environment
• Setting priorities in health research
• Planning for preventive action
• Planning for future needs
• Comparing action and health gain
• Enable internal comparisons within regions of the same country, and inter-comparisons among different countries
• Countries can combine this type of evidence along with information about policies and their costs to decide how to put their health agenda.
• Assessing performance at national level.