What are the biggest challenges of global health? Typically, we think in terms of things like vaccines and basic sanitation, which are issues in the poorest nations. But a panel on the topic, hosted by the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, painted a very different picture. The majority of the world's nations now look very much like the industrialized world, with small family sizes and life expectancies of around 70 years and up. Many of them, however, have gotten there without the sort of economic growth that preceded a graying population in the industrialized world. As a result, one of the big challenges in global health is now caring for an older population on a low budget.
The trends were driven home by the Karolinska Institute's Hans Rosling, who relied on graphs that can be created using a site called Gapminder.org. These track various demographic features of most of the world's nations, such as life expectancy, GDP per capita, etc. The plots can be rolled forward and backward in time, and individual countries can be traced as changes occur. Rosling used a series of these graphs to demonstrate a number of points about the trends that have taken place over the past century.
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