Statistical Aspects of Public Health Problems in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Countries

Abstract

The use of statistics and analytic techniques in public health research is of vital importance and has led to important applications in the wide area of public health. Some examples of such studies in which we have been involved in include; Economic, social and environmental determinants contributing to life expectancy, Building of an Automated Statistical Information system for diagnosis and determining prognosis of life threatening viral diseases and application to Japanese Encephalitis, Multivariate multilevel modeling of diabetes/cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. These and more studies will be discussed in detail, emphasizing the scope for Statistical modeling in Public Health Data. Different types of statistical models will be discussed briefly explaining the objective and the use of using the particular model. The results given by the model will be interpreted and shown how the results satisfy the objectives of the problem. These studies will be of interest to public health personal, epidemiologists and medical statisticians who are usually involved in the planning, operational and analysis stage of such studies. These studies represent developing countries where the budgets are generally low leading to relatively small sample sizes. The techniques used range from simple to advanced forms of modeling dependent upon the design and type of response/responses in the study.