November 14, 2017

Liz Returns to Seattle!

Liz returned to Seattle in September for IHME’s Global Burden of Disease 20th Anniversary Symposium. She was accompanied by her co-worker and her immediate boss, who was approached to be a discussant at the conference. “For the week we were in Seattle, we joked that our office has officially relocated to Seattle!”

The three-day GBD celebration included one full day of training in which participants could choose four priority streams to be taken through GBD 2016 findings, methodologies, and advances. Liz was most interested in translating the quantitative results of the GBD to stakeholders.

“My greatest interest was on how GBD results can be efficiently communicated to various people from citizens and policymakers to the most technical people concerned with health data. Such complex methodologies and terminologies from the GBD study would not be well understood by many policy makers and the citizens without adequate communication skills. In addition, I was very interested in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) findings of GBD given that Kenya has committed to the Voluntary National Review of SDGs where the country conducts regular and inclusive reviews of progress at the national and sub-national levels, with an aim of sharing experiences and lessons learned.”

Liz noted that the session on the epidemiologic transition of diseases was also of particular relevance, as Kenya is currently experiencing a “triple burden of disease,” with non-communicable diseases contributing to high levels of disability and death.

After a day of training, the symposium followed with a line-up of influential speakers including Bill Gates (introduced by UW President Ana Mari Cauce) and Dr. Jim Yong Kim. In his keynote address, Bill Gates discussed the role the GBD has played in driving global health priorities and how the first GBD study, published in 1993, by Dr. Christopher Murray and Dr. Alan Lopez, catalyzed the global health work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For Liz, the speech was impactful: “It was great to hear how the idea of GBD was born, and as to how it seemed a daunting or better still, an impossible task, yet has grown to be a world-renowned source of health data. I am glad that Mr. Gates saw the bigger picture and found it worth supporting this initiative.”

Special thanks to Liz Wangia for her contribution to this piece.