May 17, 2012

One in ten adults worldwide have diabetes, says the WHO in a new report. The newly released data about the chronic disease also warns about high blood pressure affecting one third of adults.

While the average global prevalence of diabetes is around 10 percent, the report said, up to a third of the population in some Pacific Island countries have the condition.

Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer are often thought of as illnesses which primarily affect people in wealthy nations, where high fat diets, alcohol consumption and smoking are major health risks.

But the WHO says almost 80 percent of deaths from such diseases now occur in low- and middle-income countries.

In Africa, rising smoking rates, a shift towards Western- style diets and less exercise mean chronic or so-called non-communicable diseases are rising rapidly and are expected to surpass other diseases as the most common killers by 2020.

“This report is further evidence of the dramatic increase in the conditions that trigger heart disease and other chronic illnesses, particularly in low- and middle-income countries,” the WHO’s director general Margaret Chan said in a statement with the report.

“In some African countries, as much as half the adult population has high blood pressure.”

This year’s WHO statistical report was the first to include data from all 194 member countries on the percentage of men and women with high blood pressure, or hypertension, and with raised blood sugar levels, a symptom of diabetes.

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Obesity is another major issue, the WHO said, with data showing rates of obesity doubling in every region of the world between 1980 and 2008.

“Today, half a billion people – or 12 percent of the world’s population – are considered obese,” said Ties Boerma, the WHO’s director of health Statistics and information systems.

The highest obesity levels are in the Americas, where 26 percent of adults are obese, and the lowest are in south east Asia, at 3 percent of adults.

The report found that women in all parts of the world are more likely to be obese than men, and are therefore at greater risk of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.

The WHO’s World Health Statistics report is published annually and contains data from 194 countries on a range of health indicators including life expectancy, illnesses and deaths from various diseases, health services, treatments, and risk factors or behaviors that affect health.

World Health Statistics 2012 is available at: here.

May 16, 2012

Africa must boost agricultural productivity and address the debilitating hunger problems if it is to grow, says a new UNDP report. AlertNet reports:

“The situation is quite bleak,” said Sebastian Levine, a UNDP policy adviser for Africa. “This economic resurgence that we have seen has not really had the impact that we would expect.”

Africa is the second fastest growing region after Asia, yet 48 percent of people were found to be living in poverty in 2008, compared to just 14 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

Africa continues to be a net importer of food despite an abundance of fertile land and water.

In its first Africa Human Development Report, “Towards a Food Secure Future”, the UNDP called for more investment in agriculture to ensure sustained growth and poverty reduction.

“If you don’t address food security, you’ll not be able to sustain this (growth),” Pedro Conceicao, UNDP’s chief economist for Africa, told AlertNet.

“In the long run, you will need populations that are healthy, that are educated, and that are able to be productive.”

Ghana became the first Sub-Saharan African country to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 partly by focusing on policies that encouraged smallholder cocoa farmers to boost output, the report said.

It also recommended policies that boost nutrition, such as school feeding programmes and fortification of food with vitamins and iodine, and increase people’s ability to withstand shocks such as drought.

The report said investment in agricultural productivity was important not only for reducing hunger but also in creating jobs for Africa’s rapidly growing population, which is predicted to double to 2 billion by 2050.

“The demographic dynamics in Africa present a huge opportunity for the continent. We have seen in many countries that this usually results in more rapid rates of economic growth,” said Conceicao.

May 15, 2012

The Times of India reports that the WHO will declare that polio is a global health emergency at the World Health Assembly (WHA) to be held May 21 to 26.

The WHO document on polio prepared for the WHA and sent to India’s health ministry says Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan – the only three polio endemic countries – have seen a significant increase in new cases in 2011 as compared to 2010.

Nigeria saw 185% increase in cases. Afghanistan and Pakistan experienced 220% and 37% rise, respectively.

Nigeria and Pakistan were the only two countries with confirmed circulation of the P3 virus strain since last September. Compounding the problem is the finance gap that is plaguing the polio fight. WHO says the world is short by $1,090 million against an overall budget of $2,230 million.

The document says, “Already in the first quarter of 2012, an insufficiency of financing required some emergency eradication activities to be scaled back in 24 at risk countries. In line with the development of the Global Polio Emergency Action Plan 2012-13, a new more efficient strategy is being examined which would combine the eradication of the residual wild poliovirus transmission with the polio endgame strategy.”

One of the decisions to be taken includes shelving an anti-polio vaccine, which is being used in India since 1978.

Once cleared, India will stop the use of trivalent oral polio vaccine (TOPV) and shift to solely using the oral bivalent one. Experts say chances of vaccine derived polio virus infection (VDPV) are higher with the use of TOPV (that targets all three strains of polio virus P1, P2 and P3) against the bivalent vaccine (that targets P1 and P3).

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WHO board is urging member states with poliovirus transmission to declare such transmission to be a “national public health emergency”, requiring the development and full implementation of emergency action plans, to be updated every six months, until such time as poliovirus transmission has been interrupted. It has also urged member states to maintain very high population immunity against polio viruses through routine immunization programmes and, where necessary, supplementary immunization activities.

“Maintain vigilance for poliovirus importations, and the emergence of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses, by achieving and sustaining certification-standard surveillance for polioviruses,” the board says.

May 14, 2012

The WHO says that 1/3 of the world’s population is suffering from TB and warns that the world is losing its progress against the spread of the illness.

Extreme drug-resistant strains of TB have now been found in 70 countries, and doctors in India reported four patients this year, who did not respond to any drugs at all. Doctors in Iran and Italy have also found patients who are apparently resistant to all drugs.

“What we are seeing worldwide is the emergence of strains of the bacillus causing tuberculosis that are resistant to most of the drugs we have available,” the Independent quoted Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO’s Stop TB campaign, as saying.

The rate of TB deaths had declined drastically – by 40 per cent between 1990 and 2000 – after a worldwide health campaign, which was particularly successful in China. But the emergence of drug-resistant strains threatens to arrest progress and jeopardises the WHO’s goal of eradicating the disease as a public health problem by 2050. In India, which has the highest prevalence of TB in the world, 50-70 per cent of patients refer to private doctors when they begin coughing.

“They don’t want to queue in public clinics that are overwhelmed and congested. But the problem with private practitioners is you don’t know who you are meeting and sometimes these people are just incompetent,” he said. Instead of prescribing the four-drug, six-month regime recommended by the WHO, private clinics prescribe either too many drugs, “which is a waste of money and increases toxicity”, or too few, which, Dr Raviglione said, increases drug resistance.

“Many doctors will not adhere to the correct regime of TB treatment. Often TB is not diagnosed: they just suspect it. They give two tuberculosis drugs, and say come back in four weeks; that is very common,” Professor Sarman Singh, a microbiologist at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said.