High quality health statistics are essential for planning and implementing health policy in all countries. This technical report, the Surveillance of Risk Factors Report 2 (SuRF2), describes the status of country-level, chronic, noncommunicable, disease risk factors and their contribution to the burden of chronic disease in populations. It presents for the first time:

- comparable country-level estimates for overweight/obesity, and systolic blood pressure;
- attribute mortality and burden from all causes of disease due to overweight/obesity and raised blood pressure for the 11 most populated countries;
- an introduction to the InfoBase on-line Country Profile pages found at http://infobase.whoint.

The methods used to produce the comparable estimates and attributable mortality and burden are also described in detail.

SuRF2 improves upon SuRF1's presentation of country-level chronic disease risk factor information in updated Country Profiles. The focus of the Country Profiles included in the report is on recent, nationally representative data.

- The risk factors included in this report are those that make the greatest contribution to mortality and morbidity from chronic disease, can be changed through primary interventions, and are easily measured in populations.
- Eight risk factors that relate mainly to cardiovascular disease and cancers fit this criteria: tobacco and alcohol use, patterns of physical inactivity, low fruit/vegetable intake, obesity (as measured by BMI), blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes (as measured by blood glucose).
- Of principal importance to the data collection is the need to display prevalence data and (where possible) mean values for these eight risk factors by age group(s) and sex and with some measure of the uncertainty of the estimates for each Member country so that the data can be used for further analysis.

Chronic disease risk factor information included in the SuRF Report Series from a variety of sources, ranging from peer-reviewed journal articles to reports and unpublished data from Ministries of Health. All of this information is held in the WHO Global InfoBase which is designed as a single source for data needs. The Global InfoBase is a tool for collecting and displaying current country-level chronic disease risk factor data and is the source of the Country Profiles of risk factor data displayed in this report.  

RA 644.6 S8 2005

Surveillance of chronic disease risk factors: Country-level data and comparable estimates. -- Geneva, Switzerland: WHO, 2005.

91 p. -- (SuRF reports; 2)
92-4-159302-4
Chronic disease--Epidemiology

79 CAF/1556 MPQLdb