Along with pursuing global development and the opportunities it promises comes analyzing and taking into consideration the risks of disease and injury at that global level. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) model has become the principle instrument for health accounting and therefore the standard for setting health research priorities, largely because it tests the reliability of raw data and ensures epidemiological consistency. Here the Disease Control Priorities Project, an international interagency group with private as well as government support, describes the next stage in the GBD, with extensive articles on measuring the global burden of disease and risk factors from 1990 to 2001, the demographic and epidemiological characteristics of major regions in the same period, data sets for disease and mortality by condition for 2001 including methods and results, comparative quantification of mortality and disease attributable to selected risk factors. This also includes sensitivity analyses, including those on uncertainty and what happens when researchers record deaths near the time of birth into estimates. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)