Ethnic women harvest corns in the northern region. Việt Nam has made significant advances in achieving the United Nation’s health-related sustainable development goals (SDG). — Photo danviet.vn

HCM CITY — Việt Nam has made significant advances in achieving the United Nation’s health-related sustainable development goals (SDG) as its SDG index score increased 59 last year, up from 38 in 2000, according to a baseline analysis from the international Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 published in the The Lancet journal last week.

A national SDG index score is based on a scale of zero to 100. Iceland tops the list with a score of 85.

The lowest-scoring nation was the Central African Republic, at 20. The United States has a score of 75, just behind Slovenia, Greece, and Japan, all at 76.

Việt Nam ranks 94 out of the 188 studied countries when benchmarked by a battery of indicators of achievement against SDGs.

Compared to countries in Southeast Asia, Việt Nam is the fifth highest – ahead of Thailand (56) and closely following Indonesia (60).

The country achieved the three best indicators on the prevalence of overweight children aged 2 to 4, the proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel and the incidence of deaths due to war.

However, Việt Nam needs further effort to improve the achievement of SDG indicators on incidence of malaria in areas where transmission is known to occur, and on hepatitis B and HIV.

In a press release on September 23, Dr Justin Beardsley of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in HCM City, said the raw score only tells part of the story. “Việt Nam has made significant progress. Behind these increasing numbers is an important human reality: higher scores mean healthier people.”

The study is a comprehensive epidemiological effort to quantify health loss across places and over time.

Last year, the UN General Assembly established the SDGs specifying 17 universal goals, 169 targets and 230 indicators leading up to 2030. —VNS