BS RAWAT
NEW DELHI : According to a latest study by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the NIMS, New Delhi, death by suicide is common in southern India. Young adults are taking their lives at an alarming rate compared to the north.

The ICMR and NIMS, combined open-source data from the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) and data from the Million Death Study for the preparation of National Burden Estimates (NBE). The methodology and the findings were published in The Lancet Global Health journal on November 8, 2019.

“NBE is a simple way to enable every country to determine their local burden of disease, what’s killing people and what’s disabling them,” says Dr Geetha Menon, a senior scientist at ICMR- National Institute of Medical Statistics.

The excess mortality in one part of the country suggests these deaths can be preventable or treatable, Menon explains.

The method offers a solution: a new Global Positioning System type method that provides countries a transparent path to improving health. It also allows governments to prioritize public health programming efficiently and take ownership of health statistics.

Dr Balram Bhargava, DG-ICMR, said: “Locally constructed health statistics help to improve a country’s health policies better. The Government of India seeks to create an understandable and locally applicable metrics for measuring health. ICMR is also the lead partner for GBD India estimates.”

“Our Institute is proud of this work. Simple and understandable methods developed collaboratively with other organisations can be easily adopted by the country researchers to develop India specific estimates” says Dr Vishnu Vardhana Rao, Director of ICMR National Institute of Medical Statistics who led the team of researchers from India.

Other findings demonstrated that cancers were more concentrated in the north. The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates in rural areas were at least twice those of urban areas for chronic respiratory disease, diarrhea and fevers of unknown origins. Disability-adjusted life years or DALY refers to a method to combine mortality and disability.