When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk fed the US Agency for International Development into the wood chipper earlier this year, one of the lesser-known casualties was the shutdown of an obscure but crucial program that tracked public health information on about half of the world’s nations.

For nearly 40 years, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program has served as the world’s health report card. In that time, it has carried out over 400 nationally representative surveys in more than 90 countries, capturing a wide range of vital signs such as maternal and child health, nutrition, education levels, access to water and sanitation, and the prevalence of diseases like HIV and malaria.

Taken together, it offered perhaps the clearest picture ever compiled of global health.

And that

See Full Page