Health at a Glance: Asia/Pacific 2020
Measuring Progress Towards Universal Health Coverage
This sixth edition of Health at a Glance Asia/Pacific presents a set of key indicators of health status, the determinants of health, health care resources and utilisation, health care expenditure and financing and quality of care across 27 Asia-Pacific countries and territories. It also provides a series of dashboards to compare performance across countries and territories, and a thematic analysis on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on Asia/Pacific health systems. Drawing on a wide range of data sources, it builds on the format used in previous editions of Health at a Glance, and gives readers a better understanding of the factors that affect the health of populations and the performance of health systems in these countries and territories. Each of the indicators is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of charts illustrating variations across countries and territories and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological box on the definition of the indicators and any limitations in data comparability. An annex provides additional information on the demographic and economic context in which health systems operate.
Tobacco
Tobacco use is the leading global cause of preventable deaths and kills more than 8 million people each year, of whom more than 7 million are from direct tobacco use and around 1.2 million are non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke. It is estimated that there were 1.1 billion current smokers in 2018, 82% of which were males. Among children between ages 13 and 15, 24 million were smokers. Although global tobacco use has fallen over the past two decades, the progress is still off track for achieving the WHO’s target of cutting tobacco use by 30% between 2010 and 2025 as part of the global efforts to reduce mortality from the four main non-communicable diseases (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic lung diseases and diabetes) (WHO, 2019[32]). The United Nations SDGs call for strengthening the implementation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in all countries and territories, as appropriate.
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