Comparative quantification of health risks : global and regional burden of disease attributable to selected major risk factors

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a number of works have addressed both the methodological and empirical aspects of population-wide impacts of major causes of diseases. This gradual establishment of or quantification has been driven partly by the academic curiosity of individual researchers and partly by the demands of regulatory agencies and public policy for better quantitative evidence on the health implications of certain risk exposures. These efforts nonetheless have generally been within the disciplinary and methodological traditions of individual risk factors and in a limited number of settings. As a result, the criteria for evaluating scientific evidence have varied greatly across risk…