https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
It was his ability to present unique data visualisations combined with his optimistic outlook that dazzled audiences and shot him to global fame when his Ted Talk presentation first hit the stage in 2006.
The New York Times described him as:
a Swedish doctor who transformed himself into a pop-star statistician by converting dry numbers into dynamic graphics that challenged preconceptions about global health and gloomy prospects for population growth.
At the time of his death the news from polio campaigners that the disease was on the brink of extinction with only 37 cases treated worldwide in 2016 – in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria – seemed testament to Professor Rosling’s lifelong commitment to improving global health issues.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty
In 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was formed, polio paralysed more than 350,000 people a year. It was the largest-ever, internationally-coordinated, public health effort. It was spearheaded by national governments, the World Health Organisation and other partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Type 2 wild poliovirus was eradicated in 1999 and case numbers of type 3 are down to the lowest-ever levels and on the way out.
The professor of international health at the prestigious Karolinska Insitute in Stockholm studied statistics and medicine from the late 1960s in Sweden and public health in India. After he received a medical licence in 1976 he worked as a doctor in Mozambique and in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he investigated Konzo, a paralytic disease, which earned him a PhD but which he also kept under scientific scrutiny for over 20 years.
The label celebrity statistician stuck to him after his first Ted Talks presentation – and later TV programmes for the BBC among others – in which his unique combination of content and his entertaining showman style earned him the reputation of “Jedi master of data visualisation”.
His use of data and graphics to challenge widely held misconceptions about global health issues and dispelling myths about the “developing world” that are part of his legacy. He argued that the latter was developing along the same lines as “the West” in terms of health and prosperity – with some even doing so twice as fast as the West!
Rosling said he was a ‘possibilist’ rather than an optimist and argued that the United Nations’ goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 was attainable. He said the mechanisms to achieve them were identified and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty had already nosedived by half in 25 years.
Though his contention that global population growth would not be as a great an issue as previously foreseen – due to increasing global wealth and subsequent fertility declines – on this issue he had his detractors notably Standford biologists Paul R. Ehrlich professor of Population Studies and Anne H. Erlich of the Center for Conservation Biology.
“There are so many who think that death keeps control of population growth,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013. “That’s just wrong!”
He told The Economist:
The only way to reach sustainable population levels is to improve public health. Child survival is the new green.
But it was his use of stats to create stunning data visualisations in his edutainment role that got his ideas the attention they received. In an interview with the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph in 2106 the medic-cum-statistician passionately argued:
Statistics take up four pages in most daily newspapers – stock values and sport [league tables]. People don’t find these boring at all, but they don’t think of them as ‘statistics’. If you support Man United or Arsenal, or if your stock falling means you can’t go on holiday, you are interested. It’s only boring if you get data you didn’t ask for, or if you don’t realise its link with the real world.
Bill Gates said Rosling’s presentation about the effectiveness of healthcare projects in the developing world was one of the key reasons he and his wife Melinda decided to give billions of dollars to the polio eradication issue and other global health initiatives.
Rosling set up his non-profit organisation Gapminder with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna in 2005 to make up-to-date statistics and educational resources available to as many people as possible. Gapminder’s mission is to “fight devastating ignorance with fact-based world views that everyone can understand”.
Rosling’s son Ola built the Trendalyzer software to animate data with graphics. In 2007 Google bought Rosling’s revolutionary software – the engine behind his show-stopping lectures – for an undisclosed sum. Rosling won many awards before his death from cancer, aged 68, in February of this year. In 2012 was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.
Hans Rosling has been posthumously honoured with a UN prize in recognition of his creative presentations on global health and poverty.
The United Nations Population Award will this year be jointly awarded to Rosling and the Association of Traditional Chiefs of Niger.
The award “recognises outstanding achievements in population and health,” according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and is given out in June each year.
Author: Mary O’Carroll
