By Sean McKee, special to Humanosphere

The world has made tremendous progress in global health during the past 25 years, reducing the impact of some major killers like HIV or, well, childbirth, and greatly expanding access to drugs or vaccines to prevent and treat many millions of the poorest people on the planet.

But sustaining that rate of progress is likely to get a lot harder. And measuring success, or failure for that matter, is likely to get more important.

According to the latest results from a massive worldwide research collaboration called the Global Burden of Disease Study, one new way of measuring progress that compares health indicators with a country’s economic development status, the United States is still doing quite poorly.

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