Introduction:
The Brocher Summer Schools or Summer Academies bring together distinguished professors from different disciplines and countries and highly promising researchers willing to acquire a strong background on a chosen topic. Beside a high level of teaching, a limited number of participants gives the students a rare opportunity to meet personally many established international professors.
All the sessions take place at the Brocher Centre in Geneva, Switzerland in an amazing and peaceful environment on the shore of the Lake of Geneva. In 2012 the Brocher Foundation hosted two summer universities, including the University of Harvard. The next summer school will take place in 2016.
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project is a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors. From its inception in the early 1990s, scientists and philosophers recognized that ethical and philosophical questions arise at every turn. For example, it must be decided whether each year in the lifespan is to count alike, and whether future deaths and disabilities should be given the same weight as those in the present. These choices and decisions matter: the share of disease burden due to myocardial infarction could vary as much as 400% depending on what position is adopted on two of the ethical choices described in the GBD 2010 report (the discount rate—if any—for health states over time, and the choice between prevalence and incidence measures).
Between 9-13 June 2014, key experts in the field of global health policy, along with senior academics in several fields and talented younger scholars, will debate a number of issues most likely to arise in the GBD area during the next several years. Among these are the choice between health and (health-related) wellbeing as the object of study and measurement; the role of GBD in priority-setting (cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and other methods); and issues arising from the mix of categorical attribution (by cause of death, according to a classification system) and counterfactual analysis.
The goals of the Summer Academy in the Ethics of Global Population Health are: advancing the field of population-level bioethics; introducing graduate students and researchers, including academic leaders, to this emerging field, motivating and enabling them to contribute to its development; orienting policy makers and practitioners in international health on relevant ethical issues; bridging disciplines; and outlining themes for future research.
June 9
Wickler and Eyal : 50 Pills
Murray : Intro to GBD Ethics
Vos The structure of GBD
Hausman : Health cannot be Measured
Salomon : Health can be measured
Hausman response to Salomon
Salomon response to Hausman
General discussion : Can health be measured
June 10
Vos : GBD Basics: Background Lecture
Murray : Introduction
Woodward : Causal Attribution, causal modelling and disease interventions
Hall : Causal Additivity
Vos : Comments
Hausman Comments
Cotton-Barratt : Comments
Discussion
Fleurbaye : Issues in the measurement of the global burden of disease
Murray : Ethical Dimensions of the Global Burden of Disease
June 11
Schroeder : Ethics and the DALY : Background Lecture
Norheim : Using Burden of Disease Data to inform priority setting in Norway
Hausman : The economic Evaluation of Health
Schokkaert Health as one component of well-being: empirical applications of equivalent income
Adler Extended preferences and the valuation of health
Fleurbaey Comments
Discussion
June 12
Voorhoeve : Personal responsibility for the burden of disease
Voorhoeve : Aggregating Competing Claims
Cotton-Barratt : Uncertainty and Discounting: How Context Matters
Stefansson : Fairness and Counterfactuals
Discussion
Kingma : The Limits of Naturalism: health, disease and values
Schroeder : Values in DALYs
Bognar : Age and time in the burden of disease
Discussion
June 12
Saxena : WHO’s ethics agenda
Cookson : Potential uses for GBD in Priority-Setting
Lauer Comment: How WHO uses GBD in WHO-CHOICE
Hausman: The Public Value of Health
Panel – Wikler-Vos-Woodward :The Remaining Agenda for Ethics and GBD