A brief history of GBD studies (cont.)

When Gro Harlem Brundtland became Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Chris Murray and several members of his research group joined Alan Lopez there from Harvard University. For the next few years, burden of disease research was centred at WHO.

New series of GBD estimates for 1999–2002 were published in successive annual releases of the World Health Report. In addition, the estimates for 2001 were published in full by the World Bank (Lopez, Mathers, Ezzati et al. 2006a) and in the Lancet (Lopez, Mathers, Ezzati et al. 2006b). This period also saw the first rigorous effort to quantify the burden of disease from a series of important risk factors (Ezzati, Lopez, Rodgers et al. 2004).

By 2003, Lopez had left WHO for the University of Queensland and Murray and his associates had returned to Harvard. Murray then moved to the University of Washington with part of the group and established the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in 2007 with funding from the Gates Foundation. Although its remit extends wider than this, IHME became the hub of a network of researchers contributing to the production of a new series of estimates of the global burden of disease referring to 2010.