Book Review: Mapping health on the Internet: strategies for learning in an information age

Abstract

health expectancies as a summary measure of the average level of health in a population is considered to have two advantages over other summary measures. Both relate to the ease of communication with non-technical audiences. The first is putting over the concept of an equivalent 'healthy' life expectancy. The second is that health expectancies are measured in units (expected years of life) and this is part of common experience. This does not apply to measures such as mortality rates or incidence rates. Despite the sterling efforts of the network represented by this text, and of the World Health Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, there remain problems of international standardisation, particularly in unmeasured differences in expectations and norms for health. Progress is being made in improving the comparability of self-report health status data, such as through calibration against established performance tests like Snellen's visual acuity test.The other parts draw extensively on the global perspective, often providing valuable summaries. Part 1 focuses on the main trends in the evolution of the population's health status, including morbidity and disability. Part 2 covers the relevance of health expectancies (social inequalities, sub-national variations, cause-deleted approaches, and mental health). Part 3 considers the pivotal measurement, collection and calculation problems.