Leprosy Mailing List – June 28, 2015
Ref.: (LML) Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs)
From: Joel Almeida, Kochaikanal, India
Dear Pieter,
The following view of Dr Naafs' view is completely in agreement with the DALY concept:
"It is completely alien to me to see a person as a production unit."
This is completely alien to the DALY concept too. Dr Naafs and DALYs are in complete agreement on this point.
DALYs deliberately treat the earnings of people as completely irrelevant. The life and health of a penniless beggar is considered to be as valuable as the life and health of Mark Zuckerman (Facebook) or the Queen of England. Illness in a penniless beggar is given exactly the same "disability weight" as the same degree of illness in the Queen of England.
This is a revolution in how we think about the value of human life, and the value of health. Anybody holding Dr Naafs' view should rejoice in DALYs. For the first time, our quantitative measurements of health status respect human beings as human beings: not for their earnings, not for their accomplishments, not for any titles or pomp, not for any decorations, not for anything other than simply being human.
The truly shocking practice in the leprosy world is referring to people requiring services as a "burden" on the services. That is unbecoming of civilised people.
Let's catch up with the rest of the world and measure the burden of disease as everyone else does: with DALYs. But let's collect and report the information which enables a more accurate estimate of DALYs. Current estimates are demonstrably too low by a factor of 10 or more.
Regards,
Joel Almeida
LML - S Deepak, B Naafs, S Noto and P Schreuder
LML blog link: http://leprosymailinglist.blogspot.it/
Contact: Dr Pieter Schreuder << editorlml@gmail.com
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