Cardiovascular Disease
The single largest killer of humans, and largely preventable.
Severity score
71.1
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Heart disease and stroke kill more people than any other cause. Hypertension, poor diets, air pollution, tobacco and physical inactivity drive the burden, and the majority of deaths now occur in low and middle income countries. Cheap interventions exist and are massively under-deployed.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
98Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
88People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
72Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
3Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
48Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
Loading history…