EPI 2008 adopts a measurement of Environmental Health (EH) used by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO captures environmental impact on human health through a measure called the Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY). The DALY metric adjusts the nominal deaths due to given environmentally-related diseases to take into account the years of life lost due to premature mortality and the loss in quality of life due to disability (morbidity). The DALY is the sum of the number of life years lost due to premature mortality caused by environmentally influenced disease and the years of healthy life lost due to disability caused by such disease.
The DALY indicator used in the 2008 EPI is an aggregate of DALY data that have been collected by the WHO. The 2008 EPI DALY indicator is an un-weighted aggregate sum of DALY data for three sources of environmental health risk: diarrhea, indoor air, and outdoor air. Thus, the DALY indicator represents EH across a range of risks. The target for DALYs is set by expert judgment at zero, reflecting the belief that no individual should face disability or death because of environmental factors.
The histograms above represent indicators used to calculate this policy subcategory score. Each dot is a single country’s proximity-to-target value for this indicator. The tinted box represents the inner quartile range of country values, or points lying between the 25th and 75th percentiles. The small triangle marker at the bottom of the chart indicates the median of country scores.
