INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC
WHO urges effort to cut chronic diseases--world's top killer--to save 36 million lives
GENEVA
A global campaign against heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer could save 36 million lives and hundreds of billions of dollars within a decade.
Cutting just two percent from the current annual toll of the "invisible epidemic" would help achieve that goal, the World Health Organization said in a new report.
Such illnesses are currently the world's top killers, claiming a combined 17 million lives a year, the WHO said in its study, "Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Vital Investment."
"This is a very serious situation, both for public health and for the societies and economies affected, and the toll is projected to increase," said WHO director general Lee Jong-wook. "The cost of inaction is clear and unacceptable."
Chronic diseases were long seen as a problem of the rich world, but four out of five sufferers now live in poorer countries. Rates are on the rise because of lifestyle changes in developing countries, where sedentary jobs, bad diet, and smoking are increasing.
The WHO also pointed to health problems amid economic change in former communist countries.
Globally, half of current sufferers are under 70 years old.
According to WHO forecasts, deaths caused by infectious diseases, antenatal and postnatal complications, and malnutrition are set to fall 10 percent by 2015. But deaths tied to chronic diseases are expected to grow 17 percent over the same period.
The risk of developing a chronic disease is increased by smoking, obesity, hypertension, high levels of cholesterol, and lack of exercise.
Some 4.9 million people die annually because of tobacco use, 2.6 million because of health problems linked to obesity, 4.4 million because of cholesterol and 7.1 million due to hypertension, the WHO said. Tackling the risk factors could help avoid 80 percent of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, as well as 40 percent of cancers.
"We know what to do, and so we must do it now," said Catherine le Gales-Camus, WHO assistant director general for noncommunicable diseases and mental health.
The report also said that the economic cost of chronic diseases runs into the billions of dollars. Over the period 2005 to 2015, the estimated income lost to China could reach US$558 billion. Losses could total US$303 billion dollars in Russia, US$236 billion in India, US$50 billion in Brazil, and US$30 billion in Britain.
The WHO is aiming to get more governments behind efforts to fight the problem.
"We cannot afford to say 'we must tackle other diseases first--HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis--then we will deal with chronic diseases,'" said Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in a statement released by the WHO. "If we wait even 10 years, we will find that the problem is even larger and more expensive to address."
More serious than bird flu
Prof. Paul Zimmet, director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Diabetes, said diabetes is a greater health problem in Asia than bird flu and AIDS combined, and has become a destructive "global diabetes tsunami." He said that while regional governments were concentrating on the potential risk from the bird flu and HIV/AIDS viruses, diabetes was already a silent epidemic in their midst.
"It's really slipped under the radar," Zimmet said. "The rates of diabetes in Asia now exceed those in Europe, where it has been seen as more of a health problem. About five percent of the adult population in Europe has diabetes. In Asia it's 10 to 12 percent and that goes up to 30 to 40 percent in the Pacific island-nations."
Zimmet presented data to an international conference in Bangkok showing diabetes kills twice as many people as infectious diseases.
"This is a global diabetes tsunami, a catastrophe that will become the health crisis of the 21st century and could reduce life expectancy globally for the first time in 200 years," he said.
Zimmet said Asia was at the heart of the crisis because of the "Coca-Colanization" of its culture, with traditional rice-based diets increasingly replaced by fatty, sugar-laden Western foods.
One of the most worrying trends about the increase in diabetes was its prevalence among young people. "In Asia we're now seeing type 2 diabetes--the adult form of the disease--in children for the first time," Simmet said. More children are becoming obese because they're not taking any physical activity at school. They're sitting at computers all day. Academic pressure has pushed physical activity out of school curricula."
Zimmet said Asian governments were not taking the diabetes threat seriously, although he praised moves by Singapore to increase exercise rates among school students.
He said the WHO was partly to blame because it spent most of its resources on battling infectious diseases. "They (governments) think 'well if the WHO isn't taking it seriously, why should we? Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people are dying from diabetes, losing legs from diabetes, going blind from diabetes, having heart attacks from diabetes and they are the highest costs to any health-care system."
AFP
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