I was interested in getting a list of countries with a “high burden of infectious diseases”. From googling around, I found this nice image from Our World in Data (I love them! Source, with CSV etc). The underlying data from this comes from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) initiative at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

But, they didn’t have it broken down by what GBD call the “level 2” causes, but only by Level 1 causes where they combine communicable, neonatal, maternal and nutritional diseases – this includes: HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections, respiratory infections and tuberculosis, enteric infections, neglected tropical diseases and malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and neonatal disorders, and nutritional deficiencies.

What I would like to do is get only the communicable disease burden instead.

I got that from the GBD website here. By tinkering around with the search criteria, I was able to extract the info I needed, and here it is in an Excel file, in case you’re interested in where a country of interest ranks in the burden of infectious diseases.

To define “high infectious disease burden” I ended up taking the top 30% (based on rank i.e. there were 204 countries/territories, I took the top 61 countries in terms of DALYs lost per 100,000 person-years).

This is not very scientific, but the countries in that list fit with my intuition of what we mean by high infectious disease burden countries. Happy to hear suggestions for how to do this in a better way!

Citation for the data:

Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network.
Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (GBD 2019) Results.
Seattle, United States: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2020.
Available from https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-results/.