Stomach cancer used to be the main cause of cancer mortality in Japan; since then, rates have fallen dramatically

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the social and economic disruption that it left behind, suicide rates in Lithuania increased rapidly. They climbed in the early 1990s and reached a peak in 1995. At 45 suicide deaths per 100,000 people, the country had one of the highest rates in the world.

But in the last few decades, rates have more than halved. You can see this in the chart.

Several factors likely contributed to the decline. Economic conditions improved, with average incomes more than doubling over just a decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and continuing to rise thereafter. In 2007, the country launched its first National Mental Health Strategy. A decade ago, it also developed a Suicide Prevention Bureau and a Suicide Prevention Action Plan.

This progress has saved many lives. Yet today it still has some of the highest rates in the world. That’s because suicide rates have not only fallen strongly in Lithuania, but in many countries — estimates for the global suicide rate suggest a 40% decline since 1995.

Since the late 20th century, astronomers and space agencies have taken steps to monitor the threat of large asteroids passing near Earth. They set up international efforts to find these objects early, track their paths, and learn more about what they’re made of, so we’d have the best chance of spotting a real collision risk in time.

As the chart shows, more than 40,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered and tracked since 1990. NASA estimates that we’ve already found over 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 1 kilometer. These are the most dangerous ones, because an impact at that size could cause global-scale damage.

Explore more interactive charts on space exploration and satellites →

If we look at income levels across countries in South and Southeast Asia, Malaysia is far richer than many of its neighbors. Its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has almost doubled since 2000. It is now more than three times higher than that of Cambodia, Laos, and Bangladesh, and more than double that of Indonesia and Vietnam.

But if we look at measures of childhood nutrition, Malaysia is not doing better. You can see this in the chart. While its neighbors have made progress on childhood stunting — the share of children under 5 who are too short for their age — Malaysia has regressed. In 2000, 20% of children were “stunted”, and this has increased to 24%.

Malaysia also stands out at a global level. When we plot the share of children who are stunted against GDP per capita, the country is a clear outlier for its level of income. Most other countries at this level of economic development have rates below 10%.

Malaysia also does relatively poorly on other measures of malnutrition. On childhood wasting — when a child’s weight is too low for their height — it has one of the highest rates in the region.

The country is off track or worsening on most global nutrition targets.

In 2021, around 1.25 million people died from diarrheal diseases. Around a third of these deaths were children.

Two main factors explain why so many children still die from diarrhea, especially in poor countries: the persistence of risk factors such as poor sanitation and unsafe water, and the lack of access to effective treatment.

Here, I want to focus on the second factor: access to a particularly effective treatment, known as oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which is essentially a mixture of clean water, salts, and sugar. Simple as it may sound, researchers writing in the medical journal The Lancet called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century.”

The chart shows how often this treatment is used in a selection of African countries. This is based on household surveys asking caregivers of children under five who recently had diarrhea whether they received ORT.

There are large gaps: in Chad and Cameroon, fewer than one in five children with diarrhea received the treatment. This reflects a mix of challenges, including low awareness of its benefits and expensive or inconsistent supply.

Importantly, though, the chart also shows that rates are much higher in Sierra Leone, where around 85% of children received ORT. This shows that much higher coverage is possible. Sierra Leone has implemented several successful policies, including free treatment for children.

Not every child with diarrhea needs this treatment — some recover without it, depending on their health and circumstances. But ORT is cheap, safe, and easy to give. In low-income settings, especially, offering it widely as a cheap preventive measure can make a big difference for those who need it.

Over the past four decades, the global number of people dying from cancer each year has doubled. This can look like the world is losing its battle with cancer: people are more likely to develop it, and we’re getting no better at treating it. This isn’t true.

There are, of course, almost 4 billion more people in the world than in 1980. And many of those people are older. This matters a lot because cancer rates rise steeply with age.

The chart shows three different measures. Total deaths just count how many people died from cancer; this is the number that has doubled. Crude death rates, shown in yellow, adjust for population size; the increase shrinks from more than 100% to around 20%. Age-adjusted rates, shown in blue, also account for the fact that countries have older populations today; we can see that the fully age-adjusted rate has actually fallen by more than 20%.

It means that for the average person, the likelihood of dying from cancer in any given year is now lower than it was for someone of a similar age in the past. The world still has a long way to go in preventing and treating cancer, but it’s wrong to think that no progress has been made.

The map shows which European countries saw an increase in population, and which saw a decrease in the year from July 2022 to 2023.

The regional divide is stark: most countries with negative population change are located in the eastern and southern parts of Europe, while countries in the west and north saw population growth.

We focus on 2022–2023 as they are the most recent years in the UN’s latest World Population Prospects, published in 2024. Temporary shocks can influence year-to-year population changes, but this regional pattern is not unique to this particular year: you see it in earlier years too, and it also shows up when you look at population change over longer periods.

A key driver of this is migration. Most countries in Western and Northern Europe have had positive net migration (i.e., more people arriving than leaving). Many countries in Eastern and Southern Europe, in contrast, have had more people leaving than arriving.

Fertility rates have been declining across Europe, and all of these countries now have rates below the replacement level. That means that across much of Europe, since deaths now exceed births, the population would be shrinking without migration. In Western and Northern Europe, positive net migration has been offsetting this.