One of the metrics used to define the burden of disease is DALY, or Disability-Adjusted Life Years. It quantifies the difference between the actual health status of a population and an ideal situation where all individuals live long lives free of disease and disability. It measures mortality and morbidity, and it’s a measurement based on time. This allows for the impact of disease or risk factor to be determined in that one DALY is equivalent to one lost year of healthy life.
DALY = YLL (Years of life lost to premature death) + YLD (Years lived with a disability)
Given that posts sometimes take 15 minutes to write but two hours to upload, I’ve come up with a unit of measurement to measure the burden of slow internet for an aid worker living in a developing country.
SIALY (Slow internet adjusted life years) = YLL (Years of Life Lost) + YLSI (Years living with Slow Internet)
Mind you, my slow high-speed connection in this Kingdom’s capital is not as bad as some of the screaming fast Commodore 64 connections that other colleagues have to contend with. So kudos to the best of you who can produce creative pieces of writing amid these uninspiring conditions. I think I just grayed three more hairs.
:-(