by sgn09 | Nov 19, 2023 | Dashboard
HIV persists as a noteworthy communicable disease in Europe and a substantial risk in the Arab world, posing a significant health challenge. This infection is associated with considerable healthcare costs for treatment and care, a noteworthy mortality rate, and a reduction in life expectancy. The virus specifically attacks the immune system, resulting in a persistent and severe illness with an extended incubation period before symptoms manifest.
The average prevalence from 2005 to 2021 reveals notable trends. While some Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Iraq, do not consistently report HIV statistics, the available data highlights the prevalence of the disease in Arab countries situated in Africa. In contrast, European countries, particularly Portugal, Latvia, France, and Italy, exhibit higher prevalence rates.
Within the Arab world, there is an upward trend in the percentage of HIV incidences in Yemen, Algeria, Qatar, and Tunisia. Conversely, Djibouti, Mauritania, Morocco, Comoros, Sudan, and Libya exhibit a decline in HIV incidence rates.
Within the Euro area, there is an increase in HIV incidences observed in Slovakia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Greece, Lithuania, and Ireland. However, a decrease is noted in the Netherlands, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Spain, and Croatia.
HIV prevalence is higher in European Union countries compared to Arab countries. There was an incline in Arab countries around 2020, while in the European Union, the trend experienced a decrease in 2017, followed by a slight upward movement.
We will be focusing on these countries in the following visuals.
Most countries do not report parameters related to children living with HIV and newly infected children. However, the available data indicates that in Algeria and Morocco, both the number of children infected and the number of new cases are on the rise. In contrast, Djibouti has successfully decreased these numbers, as has Mauritania.
In our selected focus countries, notable instances of HIV infection among the female population are observed. Within Arab countries, Djibouti, Comoros, Mauritania, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia exhibit a high prevalence. Similarly, in EU countries, France, Portugal, Latvia, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Italy show a high number of females infected with HIV.
Antiretroviral therapy coverage has seen an increase since 2005 in Djibouti, Mauritania, and Morocco within the Arab world, as well as in Latvia and Bulgaria. The effectiveness of the treatment is reflected in the declining incidence cases observed. However, in Algeria, despite an increase in treatment coverage, the number of incidents continues to rise. A similar situation is noted in Slovenia, suggesting that the treatment alone may not be sufficient to curb the spread of HIV.
Information pertaining to condom use and protected sex is currently unavailable, emphasizing the need to gather this specific dataset.
In conclusion, Europe & the Arab World are far from meeting global HIV targets. Annual new HIV infections from AIDS-related illness are on the rise. While treatment can contribute to reducing the prevalence of HIV in a country, it is just one aspect of a comprehensive approach. Relying solely on treatment is inadequate. Nations should prioritize addressing other impactful factors, including:
- Implementing prevention programs that effectively reach key populations in substantial numbers.
- Making special efforts to enhance and extend HIV testing and treatment initiatives.
- Increasing engagement with the younger demographic.
- Enforcing effective policies such as mandatory testing for work or residence permits, mandatory testing for marriage, and criminalizing activities such as sex work and drug use or possession for personal use.
by jbe11 | Nov 22, 2022 | Dashboard, Generic, Visualization
The most important statistic for measuring population health is life expectancy. Life expectancy captures mortality across the whole life course, making it more comprehensive than the restricted measure of newborn and child mortality, which concentrates only on mortality at a young age. It provides information on the typical death age for a population.
Since the Age of Enlightenment, life expectancy has rapidly grown. Life expectancy began to rise in the early industrialized nations in the 19th century, but it remained low in the rest of the world. As a result, there was a huge disparity in the distribution of health throughout the world. Good health in the wealthy nations and continuously poor health in the developing nations. This worldwide inequality has declined during the last few decades. The nations with the highest life expectancy in 1800 are the only ones in the world with a lower life expectancy today. Many nations that were formerly afflicted by poor health are quickly catching up.
The world map below shows the life expectancy of the year 2000.
African nations have been struggling with health related issues for quite some time. One of them is that, when compared to other continents, such as Europe Africa has the nations with the lowest life expectancies. Why is that? Does government health expenditure play a big role disaster?
Government health expenditure plays an important role in guaranteeing people’s livelihood and in improving the quality of human capital, and it also plays an important role in affecting economic development.
In order to characterize the specific trend of government health spending affecting life expectancy in Africa, the dashboard below chart shows the expenditure in healthy sectors by the government, from years 2000 to 2018, of the top 3 countries (in terms of life expectancy) and the bottom 3 in comparison as shown in the map.
We clearly see that countries with high government expenditure have a higher life expectancy.
Even though African nations still have a low life expectancy in comparison to other countries, significant improvement has been made since the early 2000s as life expectancy within African nations has seen an increase of at least 10 years.This shows a positive relationship between government health expenditure and life expectancy.
What we can do to further help and develop Africa is to create a funded project by the UN or the WHO to help create more hospitals in the region that would be specialized in treating and aiding people with diseases.
by Sirine Jaber | May 5, 2020 | Dashboard
Suicide
Each year, One million persons die r because of suicide, and this reflects a mortality rate of one death every forty seconds.
Additionally, the rates of suicide deaths have increased by 60% in the last 45 years worldwide. For this, suicide became one of the three main causes of mortality among the males and females that are 15 to 44 years old. This is a problem that is a concern for every country therefore performing data exploration and analysis is of high importance, few recommendations will be suggested and will be directed to governments to take action at the first place and then to parents and schools to be aware of the reasons behind the increasing numbers in order to raise awareness among the future generations.
It is clear that East European countries have higher suicide rates compared to west European countries. Post Soviet Union European countries have very high suicide rates because of high economic and political instability that followed the collapse of the Union. These high rates are associated high levels of substance abuse.
For this, awareness should be spread about the dangers of substance use in educational schools and systems. Also, substance rehabilitation centers are a way to reduce the numbers of drug abusers and in turn reduce the suicide risk.
