Disability-Adjusted Life Year

Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates from All Causes by country (per 100,000 inhabitants). Color indicates rate. It ranges from 9,250 for light yellow to over 80,000 for dark red.

Detroit Steve sent me a link to a complicated DALY chart. There are a bunch of diseases listed, but what the heck is a DALY? Wikipedia knows:

    The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death. It was developed in the 1990s as a way of comparing the overall health and life expectancy of different countries.
    The DALY is becoming increasingly common in the field of public health and health impact assessment (HIA). It "extends the concept of potential years of life lost due to premature death...to include equivalent years of 'healthy' life lost by virtue of being in states of poor health or disability."^[2] In so doing, mortality and morbidity are combined into a single, common metric.
    Looking at the burden of disease via DALYs can reveal surprising things about a population's health. For example, the 1990 WHO report^{[citation needed]} indicated that 5 of the 10 leading causes of disability were psychiatric conditions. Psychiatric and neurologic conditions account for 28% of all years lived with disability, but only 1.4% of all deaths and 1.1% of years of life lost. Thus, psychiatric disorders, while traditionally not regarded as a major epidemiological problem, are shown by consideration of disability years to have a huge impact on populations.