International Comparison of Data
With the help of the World Health Organization's “Statistical Information System database” the paper will compare two totally different countries. The comparison will be made between the United States and Nigeria. I decided to compare two countries with different political system, different geography and development. For the comparison three health indicators were chosen: “life expectancy at birth in years, under-5 mortality rate per1000 live births and total expenditure on health per capita”.
All three indicators are a global indicator for deciding the health conditions, among others in the countries. Life expectancy at birth shows “the overall mortality level of population” (World Health Organization, n.d.). It is a standard indicator to show the quality of life. Health can undermine the quality and even shorten the life span. It is an indicator of societal well-being and success. The indicator inhibits social and economic development. Poor health conditions usually result in a lower expectancy rate (United Nations Development Program, n.d.). The second indicator chosen was under-5 mortality rate, which shows the access to health care. The rate shows deprived from essentials goods and services that help the children to survive, grow and develop. The higher rate means there lack of nutrition, water, access to basic health services, sanitation facilities, adequate shelter, information and education (United Nations Development Program, n.d.). The third indicator expenditure shows in some degree. The health conditions are related to some degree to the GDP, but are not completely dependent on the wealth production in every given economy. Since also the effectiveness of national healthcare system and equal access to the health care must be taken into an account. This can be explained by the comparison made between the EU and United States (EUROSTAT, n.d.), but for the paper it is obvious that we are comparing a developed country with developing one and that expenditures given to the health care matters.
Source: World Health Organization, 2013a and 2013b.
Life expectancy greatly differs among the compared countries. In the United States the life expectance for males was at 76 and for females at 81 which were a lot higher than the life expectancy in Nigeria, where life expectancy was 22 years lower of men and 26 years lower for females in the compared year 2013 (World Health Organization, 2013a and 2013b).
Under-5 mortality rate has also shown vast differences. In Nigeria 325 children under-5 died in comparison to the 1000 lives births and in the United States only seven. The under-5 mortality rate is higher in the developing countries as in more developed ones (World Health Organization, 2013a and 2013b). This indicator should further extend to the number of hospitals available and access to the health care, since the reasons for the high rate might differ from country to country. Risk factors are in the Nigeria very high which ranked the country based on UNICEF in the second place of measuring the unde-5 deaths. Every day the loss is estimated at 2.300 young lives, which essential intervention could avert (UNICEF, n.d.).
United States expenditures on health per capita reached 17.1 % in 2013 and in Nigeria 3.7 % (World Health Organization, 2013a and 2013b). The interesting fact here is that the United States in this year had the highest expenditures on health per capita among all developing countries compared to the WHO statistics (World Health Organization 2013a and 2013b).
Work cited
EUROSTAT. (n.d.).Quality of Life Indicators – Health. Retrieved ¸ http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Quality_of_life_indicators_- _health#Health_in_the_context_of_quality_of_life
UNICEF. (n.d.). Maternal and Child Health: Nigeria. Retrieved http://www.unicef.org/nigeria/children_1926.html
United Nations Development Program. (n.d). Human Development Index. Retrieved http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Definitions. http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat2006DefinitionsAndMetadata.pdf
World Health Organization. (2013). Nigeria: WHO Statistical Profile. Retrieved http://www.who.int/gho/countries/nga.pdf?ua=1
World Health Organization. (2013). United States: WHO Statistical Profile. Retrieved
http://www.who.int/gho/countries/usa.pdf?ua=1
