Hans Rosling

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Hans Rosling Swedish pronunciation: [h?:ns ²ru:sl??] (27 July 1948 - 7 February 2017) was a Swedish physician, academic, statistician, and public speaker. He was the Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data to explore development issues.

Video Hans Rosling

Biography

Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on 27 July 1948. From 1967 to 1974 Rosling studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1972 he studied public health at St. John's Medical College, Bangalore, India. He became a licensed physician in 1976 and from 1979 to 1981 he served as District Medical Officer in Nacala in northern Mozambique. On 21 August 1981, Rosling began investigating an outbreak of konzo, a paralytic disease first described in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His investigations earned him a Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 1986.

Rosling presented the television documentary The Joy of Stats, which was broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Four in December 2010. He presented a documentary Don't Panic -- The Truth about Population for the This World series using a Musion 3D projection display, which appeared on BBC Two in the UK in November 2013. In 2015, he presented the documentary Don't Panic: How to End Poverty in 15 Years, which was produced by Wingspan and aired on the BBC just ahead of the announcement of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Rosling was a sword swallower, as demonstrated in the final moments of his second talk at the TED conference. In 2009 he was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy, and in 2011 as one of 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company. In 2011 he was elected member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and in 2012 as member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was included in the Time 100 list of the world's 100 most influential people in 2012.

Maps Hans Rosling

Personal health and death

When he was 20, in 1968, doctors told Rosling that there was something wrong with his liver and as a consequence he stopped drinking alcohol. In 1989, Rosling was diagnosed with hepatitis C. Over the years this progressed and Rosling developed liver cirrhosis. In the beginning of 2013 he was in early stages of liver failure. However, at the same time new hepatitis C drugs were released and Rosling went to Japan to buy the drugs needed to cure the infection. He expressed concerns in the media over the restricted use of the new drugs due to high costs, stating that it is a crime not to give every person with hepatitis C access to the drugs.

A year after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Rosling died in Sweden on 7 February, 2017 at the age of 68.

Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box | TED Talk

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Work in healthcare and statistics

Rosling spent two decades studying outbreaks of konzo, a paralytic disease, in remote rural areas across Africa and supervised more than ten PhD students. His work with Julie Cliff, Johannes Mårtensson, Per Lundqvist, and Bo Sörbo found that outbreaks occur among hunger-stricken rural populations in Africa where a diet dominated by insufficiently processed cassava results in simultaneous malnutrition and high dietary cyanide intake.

Rosling's research also concerned other links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health. He was a health adviser to WHO, UNICEF and several aid agencies. In 1993 he was one of the initiators of Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden. At Karolinska Institutet he was head of the Division of International Health (IHCAR) from 2001 to 2007. As chairman of the Karolinska International Research and Training Committee (1998-2004) he started health research collaborations with universities in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. He started new courses on global health and co-authored a textbook on global health that promotes a fact-based world view.

Alongside Steven Pinker, Rosling has been criticized as being Pollyannaist about the global situation in the face of tragedies such as the conflict in Syria. His work on population growth has been roundly criticised by Paul R. Ehrlich, the U.S. biologist and Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, and Anne H. Ehrlich, associate director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, referring to him as "A Confused Statistician" in an article published online by the MAHB.

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Trendalyzer and Gapminder

Rosling's son, Ola Rosling, built the Trendalyzer software to animate data compiled by the UN and the World Bank that helped him explain the world with graphics. Rosling co-founded the Gapminder Foundation together with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund to develop Trendalyzer to convert international statistics into moving, interactive graphics. The provocative presentations that have resulted have made him famous. and his lectures using Gapminder graphics to visualise world development have won awards. The interactive animations are freely available from the Foundation's website.

In March 2007 Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics. In 2008 Google made available a Motion Chart Google Gadget and in 2009 the Public Data Explorer.

The Swedish professor Hans Rosling passed away yesterday Â» World ...

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Awards

2010 - The Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement (US)
2012 - Time 100 most influential people list
2012 - Harvard Humanitarian Award
2014 - Honorary Doctor at Uppsala University, Sweden
2014 - The Royal Patron's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society of London.
2017 - United Nations Population Award

Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen | TED Talk

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Selected publications

Thorson, A.; Ragnarsson, A.; Rosling, H.; Ekström, A. (2010). "Male circumcision reduces HIV transmission. The risk of transmission from woman to man is halved". Lakartidningen. 107 (46): 2881-2883. PMID 21197783.
Hanson, S.; Thorson, A.; Rosling, H.; Örtendahl, C.; Hanson, C.; Killewo, J.; Ekström, A. M. (2009). Husereau, Don, ed. "Estimating the Capacity for ART Provision in Tanzania with the Use of Data on Staff Productivity and Patient Losses". PLoS ONE. 4 (4): e5294. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005294. PMC 2667213 . PMID 19381270.
Von Schreeb, J.; Riddez, L.; Samnegård, H.; Rosling, H. (2008). "Foreign field hospitals in the recent sudden-onset disasters in Iran, Haiti, Indonesia, and Pakistan". Prehospital and disaster medicine : the official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the World Association for Emergency and Disaster Medicine in association with the Acute Care Foundation. 23 (2): 144-151; discussion 151-3. PMID 18557294.
Schell, C. O.; Reilly, M.; Rosling, H.; Peterson, S.; Ekström, A. M. (2007). "Socioeconomic determinants of infant mortality: A worldwide study of 152 low-, middle-, and high-income countries". Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. 35 (3): 288-297. doi:10.1080/14034940600979171. PMID 17530551.
Von Schreeb, J.; Rosling, H.; Garfield, R. (2007). "Mortality in Iraq". The Lancet. 369 (9556): 101. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60058-0. PMID 17223462.
Elrayah, H.; Eltom, M.; Bedri, A.; Belal, A.; Rosling, H.; Ostenson, C. (2005). "Economic burden on families of childhood type 1 diabetes in urban Sudan". Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. 70 (2): 159-165. doi:10.1016/j.diabres.2005.03.034. PMID 15919129.
Thanh, H. T. T.; Jiang, G. X.; Van, T. N.; Minh, D. P. T.; Rosling, H.; Wasserman, D. (2005). "Attempted suicide in Hanoi, Vietnam". Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 40 (1): 64-71. doi:10.1007/s00127-005-0849-6. PMID 15624077.
Rosling, H. (2004). "New map of world health is needed. North and South is changed to healthy and ill and West to rich and poor". Lakartidningen. 101 (3): 198-201. PMID 14763091.
Rosling, H.; Rosling, O.; Rosling Rönnlund, A. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books. p. 288. ISBN 9781250123817.

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References