ArticlePublic health ethics2017
Out of Alignment? Limitations of the Global Burden of Disease in Assessing the Allocation of Global Health Aid.
Article in Public health ethics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The burden of premature mortality from cardiovascular diseases: A systematic review of years of life lost.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- Assessing trauma care systems in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and evidence synthesis mapping the Three Delays framework to injury health system assessments.BMJ global health · 2021Pooled it
- Tracking funding disparities in global health aid with machine learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- On the Unfairness of the 'Fair-share Principle' for Health Research.Public health ethics · 2026Article
- The trend of self-harm incidence rates among adolescents in low- and lower-middle-income countries and its associated contextual factors.Global mental health (Cambridge, England) · 2026Article
- The Health of Nations Fund: Financing global drug development.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Global burden of hemolytic disease and neonatal jaundice from 1990 to 2021 with projections to 2050: a systematic analysis of the GBD 2021 data.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- Global burden of hearing loss in people aged 60 years and older, 1990-2021: results from the global burden of disease study.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Costs and cost-effectiveness of community health worker programs focussed on HIV, TB and malaria infectious diseases in low- and middle-income countries (2015-2024): A scoping literature review.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
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- Burden attributable to Iodine deficiency in Iran from 1990 to 2019: findings from Global Burden of Disease study.Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene · 2024Article
- Insights into epidemiological trends of severe chest injuries: an analysis of age, period, and cohort from 1990 to 2019 using the Global Burden of Disease study 2019.Scandinavian journal of trauma, resuscitation and emergency medicine · 2024Article
- Trends in incidence and mortality of early-onset cancer in Germany between 1999 and 2019.European journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Article
- Trends in the burden of most common obesity-related cancers in 16 Southern Africa development community countries, 1990-2019. Findings from the global burden of disease study.Obesity science & practice · 2024Article
- Mortality and mental health funding-do the dollars add up? Eating disorder research funding in Australia from 2009 to 2021: a portfolio analysis.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2023Article
- Can global or national disability weights represent provincial level?BMC public health · 2023Article
- The role of age inequalities in cause of death in the slow pace of epidemiological transition in India.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The global, regional and national burden of peptic ulcer disease from 1990 to 2019: a population-based study.BMC gastroenterology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project quantifies the impact of different health conditions by combining information about morbidity and premature mortality within a single metric, the Disability Adjusted Life Year. One important goal for the GBD project has been to inform decisions about global health priorities. A number of recent studies have used GBD data to argue that global health funding fails to align with the GBD. We argue that these studies' shared assumption that global health resources should 'align' with the burden of disease is unfounded and has troubling implications. First, since the allocation of resources involves difficult trade-offs between different, potentially competing goals, any 'misalignment' of allocation and disease burdens need not necessarily indicate that the allocation of funds fails to meet recipient countries' needs or interests. Second, using alignment as a baseline implicitly makes controversial assumptions about how harms of different magnitudes affecting different numbers of individuals should be aggregated. We discuss two alternative ways in which GBD data could help inform decisions about resource allocation, neither of which gives more than a limited role to GBD data.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.