Measurement of biomarkers in surveys in developing countries: opportunities and problems

摘要

Reliable and comprehensive data on disease levels, patterns, and trends in populations are required to monitor global and local epidemics and to assess the effectiveness of public health approaches to the prevention and control of disease and injury. For most developing countries, little is reliably known about causes of mortality or about disease incidence and duration. For these populations "epidemiological manipulation, extrapolation, and estimation procedures" have been used to make imprecise estimates of the burden of disease (Murray and Lopez 1996), and meager databases are used to plan and evaluate health programs. Advances in technology offer the opportunity to include biological and clinical data collection in existing largescale, national sample surveys. Such data could result in significantly better insight into public health problems and more rational and equitable policies leading to improved health in developing countries. Collecting biological and clinical data--referred to here asbiomarkers--in large-scale national surveys, however, poses a number of logistical and ethical issues that must be successfully addressed.