Stanton D. answered • 11/05/19
Tutor to Pique Your Sciences Interest
Hi Davis D.
Sorry, but your question is not well formed. "Top" diseases, and "most" countries, are the mushy points. If you want a category such as disease name, and want to consider the top diseases as those affecting the greatest number of people per country, and then add the numbers of countries with a particular disease, and finally rank by number of countries with a particular disease, that's one query. But it's not a very informative one; small countries, even with only a few patients per disease, will easily swamp large countries with large numbers of patients! However, it's fair to point out that diseases with high incidence regionally or locally, might be significant global health hazards, even if they don't currently affect many countries (e.g. Ebola and measles); also, such diseases may be economically very significant where they occur (e.g. schistosomiasis) even though most countries don't have them at all.
So the usual measure would be global incidence of each disease; by this measure things like cancer(s) and heart disease (from arterial blockage, or otherwise -- I have bradycardia, for example, even though my general arterial health is fine) would top the list. This doesn't discriminate by country population.
In interpreting what a question like this might mean, you should consider what issue is being probed: is it general global health (i.e. causes of morbidity and mortality globally), is it treatable parasitic diseases and their economic burden, is it early warning for possible epidemic conditions (prior global data would be useless for this purpose!), is it establishing a treatment-priority scheme for a global health treatment system, and so on.
Hope I've given you thoughts on interpreting your global healthcare data --
Cheers, -- Mr. d.
