Four years ago, report from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva stated that “nearly 400 million people will die from heart diseases, diabetes and other chronic ailments over the next 10 years, but many of those deaths can be prevented by healthier lifestyles and inexpensive medications.” Of the 40 million deaths per year in the world, 28 million would be in developing countries.
WHO director-general Lee Jong Wook commented that “the lives of too many people in the world are being blighted and cut short by chronic diseases. He cited the latest WHO report “to draw attention to the increasing threat from diseases that can be prevented in part by healthier diets and giving up smoking,” writes the Associated Press.
This recent report also was the first “to quantify the economic burden of treating such conditions in individual countries.” China, for instance, will be spending $588 billion in the next ten years, Russia, $303, and India $236, in managing heart disease, diabetes and strokes.
The co-author of the study, Robert Beaglehole, lamented that this epidemic is preventable because “we know what to do, how to do it, and preventions are very cheap,” and yet people die unnecessarily.
The WHO report highlighted the fact that heart-diseases-related mortality is down 70% in the United States, England, Australia and Canada in the last 30 years because of effective national prevention policies and campaigns in these industrialized nations that cut the death rates significantly. Citing Poland’s statistics which showed reduced death rates among young adults by 10% in 1990, “in part by making fruits and vegetables more available, and removing subsidies on dairy products, like butter.”
The following tabulation of the Leading Causes of Mortality (Number and Rate per 100,000 Population) in the Philippines will show we are part of this pandemic.
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Philip S. Chua, MD, FACS, FPCS, Cardiac Surgeon Emeritus in Northwest Indiana and chairman of cardiac surgery from 1997 to 2010 at Cebu Doctors University Hospital, where he holds the title of Physician Emeritus in Surgery, is based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the Philippine College of Surgeons, and the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society. He is the chairman of the Filipino United Network – USA, a 501(c)(3) humanitarian foundation in the United States. Email: [email protected]
