Gulnoza Usmanova

Not many people can say that their research helped pass a law, but Gulnoza Usmanova’s work on tobacco control resulted in national legislation approved by the government of Uzbekistan in September 2011.

Before coming to IHME, Gulnoza worked for the Ministry of Health in Uzbekistan. She was the principal investigator on a project with the World Bank to estimate the prevalence of smoking in the country, as well as the health and economic costs associated with tobacco use.

The legislation covers financial and nonfinancial measures to decrease tobacco use in Uzbekistan. The law aims to increase taxes, completely ban all advertisements, establish smoke-free public places, and label cigarette packages. 

This work convinced Gulnoza of the importance of sound data and health measurement methods. “The tobacco industry is a big economic player in Uzbekistan, but policymakers were convinced by our data that the health effects and expenditures by households were too high compared to the benefit received by the government from tobacco companies,” she explains.

That realization led her to the Post-Graduate Fellowship at IHME. “I wanted to learn advanced methods of gathering data and measurement techniques in order to inform policymakers in a timeframe that allows them to target research accordingly.”

At IHME, Gulnoza is working on the Integrated Surveillance Systems research team as part of a collaboration between IHME and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). IHME is working with the IDB’s Division of Social Protection and Health to develop household and health facility surveys for the Salud Mesoamérica 2015 Initiative. The IDB will use data from the surveys in combination with other existing sources to measure coverage of key interventions in nutrition, immunization, and maternal and child health in southern Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.

Gulnoza is designing a component of the health facility surveys, including review of facilities’ medical records. One main challenge of this survey is to develop methodology for data collection to capture all the necessary information, often lacking in resource-poor settings, to monitor and evaluate the quality of health services.  

Gulnoza is also trying to involve some of the Former Soviet Union countries in IHME’s Access, Bottlenecks, Costs, and Equity project. She believes this project will help these countries, which are all undergoing reforms in their health sectors, to improve the equity and cost effectiveness of their health systems based on quality evidence. 

“Uzbekistan and the other Former Soviet Union countries are underrepresented currently in global health research. My aim is to bring more countries, including my own, to the global health research arena through comprehensive data collection, country-level analysis, and proactive dissemination of our results.”

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