Replication Data for: Rethinking the Measurement of Undernutrition in a Broader Health Context
This database provides estimates of the burden of undernutrition and its costs to societies around the world. To derive these estimates, various health outcomes were attributed to undernutrition, as suggested in the literature. The health outcomes that are covered in the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study and that relate directly to undernutrition are: protein –energy malnutrition, iodine deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, and iron-deficiency anemia. Furthermore, 18 percent of diarrheal diseases and 41 percent of lower respiratory infections can be attributed to zinc deficiency, and 5 percent of maternal mortality can be attributed to iron-deficiency anemia. Aggregating the Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost due to these various health outcomes (and using 2011 population figures to generate DALYs estimates for 2011 from the WHO's data for 2004) yields results for the burden of hunger in all its forms in terms of DALYs lost in 2011 at the global and country level. Globally, 44 million DALYs are lost due to micronutrient malnutrition (hidden hunger) and 21 million DALYs are lost due to undernourishment (chronic hunger). While the same individual can be both undernourished and suffering from one or another micronutrient deficiency, in the calculation of DALYs the various health outcomes are clearly differentiated by cause; that is, DALYs lost are summable (which is one of their conceptual strengths). Therefore, added together, the global burden of hunger in all its forms amounts to 65 million DALYs lost — about 4 percent of the total burden of disease. All these calculations use the latest data on DALYs lost at the country–level provided by the WHO. In addition, another set of estimates of the cost of undernutrition at the global level is derived from more recent, but less disaggregated data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).