Survey from Around the Globe Reveals Impact of Disability

People that are living around the globe are living much longer than they have in the past, but many of those years added on are blighted by disability, according to estimates taken by the global burden of disease, debilitating disorders and injuries. This project and estimates were taken by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. Back in the 1970’s many people only expected to live into their 40’s or 50’s. Now we continue to see those in their 90’s and 100’s. There are many impacts that come into play with this statistic such as better education, improved health technologies and reducing those deaths that are due to maternal and child illnesses, diseases and malnutrition. Many of the major challenges we face today are non-communicable diseases such as cancer and high blood pressure.

There are also many musculoskeletal ailments and mental illnesses that are making it harder to treat people and continue to give higher costs and more challenges for the health care system. Many of the poorer countries do not have actual data on those that have disabilities throughout their countries since they do not document them well, and a lot of those people do not seek out medical help due to not have medical insurance or not being able to be treated. Researchers continue to work on finding more about the statistics involving disability throughout the world.