Terms to Know in Global Health

While morbidity and mortality are often used together within discussions about global health, they are definitely not the same. Morbidity is another term for illness — or the incidence of disease or being unhealthy. Individuals can have multiple illnesses at the same time, which are then referred to as co-morbidities. However, mortality is another term for death — with the mortality rate reflective of the number of deaths due to a specific disease within a specified population. The World Health Organization’s description of how such data is reported helps clarify how this term is used in global health: “Mortality data indicate numbers of deaths by place, time and cause. WHO’s mortality data reflect deaths registered by national civil registration systems of deaths, with the underlying cause of death coded by the national authority.”

An NGO is defined as a “nonprofit group largely funded by private contributions that operates outside of institutionalized government or political structures.” NGOs play a key role in global health — helping to provide valuable tools, resources and funding for global health research and acting as channels for government funding to implement global health programs. NGOs may work on very specific global health issues — such as HIV, family planning and reproductive health, and sanitation — or broader development issues. A 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation report that evaluated NGO funding by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) noted that in 2013, 135 U.S.-based NGOs received global health funding through the agency to implement global health activities in 72 countries and across multiple regions.