Global Health Priorities
Progress in global health is real but no longer automatic. Child mortality keeps falling — but malaria and measles, two of the cheapest wins in medicine, have stalled and backslid since 2019.
Human Development tells the long-run story: on the measures that matter most, the last two centuries have been an extraordinary run of improvement. This dashboard is the uncomfortable footnote to that story — progress is real, but it is no longer automatic.
Child mortality is still falling, and it anchors the optimistic case: under 4% of children now die before age five, down from over 40% two centuries ago. But zoom in on the last decade and two of the best-understood, cheapest interventions in all of global health are going backwards. Malaria deaths fell by a third between 2000 and 2019 — then stalled, and by 2024 had climbed back to roughly their 2012 level, erasing a decade of progress. Measles vaccine coverage slipped during the pandemic and has never fully recovered, and reported cases have rebounded sharply. Neither is a mystery of the lab; both are failures of delivery, funding, and attention. The cheap wins don't stay won on their own.
Data: Our World in Data (CC BY).
Malaria — the stall nobody expected
yearlyInsecticide-treated bednets cost about $5 and are among the lowest cost-per-life-saved interventions known. They worked: malaria deaths fell from ~864,000 in 2000 to ~567,000 in 2019, a third gone. Then the line stalled. COVID disruption, pyrethroid resistance, funding shortfalls, and population growth in endemic zones pushed deaths back to ~610,000 by 2024 — essentially the 2012 level, a decade of progress erased. Incidence tells the same story from the other side: from 80 cases per 1,000 at risk in 2000 to 58 in 2019, then *back up* to 64 by 2024. The cheapest win in global health plateaued while the nets kept shipping. The deep dive is Malaria: the stall nobody expected.
@admin · 18d ago
Measles — the backslide
yearlyMeasles is the canary: so contagious that coverage below ~95% lets it resurge. First-dose vaccine coverage climbed to 86% by 2019 — still short of the herd-immunity threshold — then dropped to 81% in 2021 as the pandemic disrupted childhood immunisation, the largest sustained backslide in ~30 years. It has only partly recovered, to 84% in 2024. Reported cases are noisier (surveillance itself dips when health systems are stressed, so the 2021 low is partly under-reporting), but the direction since is unmistakable: cases rebounded to ~675,000 in 2024, the most since the 2019 outbreak year. A few points of lost coverage is all it takes.
@admin · 18d ago
Discussion of this dashboard
Threads here are about the dashboard as a whole — its framing, what's missing, whether the constituent indicators tell a coherent story. Per-indicator discussion lives under each panel above.
Log in to start a discussion about this dashboard.
No discussions yet. Be the first.
3.7% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday in 2023, down from 42.8% in 1800 and still falling. This is the baseline everything else on this dashboard is measured against — the single largest humanitarian achievement of the modern era, driven by vaccines, clean water, oral rehydration, and antibiotics. The line still bends the right way. The question the next two panels ask is whether the specific tools behind it are still gaining ground.
@admin · 18d ago