WHO: 42m under-5s obese
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MORE than 3 million people are dying prematurely in China each year from chronic non-communicable diseases, the World Health Organization said in a report released yesterday.
It called on the country to step up efforts “to stop the tsunami of chronic disease.”
Chronic non-communicable diseases, such as lung cancer, strokes, heart disease and diabetes, accounted for 8.6 million deaths on China’s mainland in 2012, the WHO said in a statement.
The organization said that the prevalence of many key risk factors in China is “worryingly high.”
It said that over half of all men in the country are smokers, more than four in five adolescents do not engage in sufficient physical activity and around one in five adults have blood pressure levels that are too high.
“This new report is a dramatic wake-up call,” Bernhard Schwartlander, WHO’s representative in China, said in the statement.
“There is an urgent need for strong action now — to stop millions of Chinese men and women dying in their most productive years from diseases that can be prevented simply by changing common unhealthy lifestyle habits: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, unhealthy diet, and not enough physical activity.”
In 2011, the World Bank said that the economic benefit of reducing cardiovascular diseases by 1 percent per year from 2010-2040 in China could generate more than US$10.7 trillion, equivalent to 68 percent of China’s real GDP in 2010.
This “lifestyle disease” epidemic “causes a much greater public health threat than any other epidemic known to man,” said Shanthi Mendis, lead author of the WHO’s Chronic Diseases Prevention and Management report.
Non-communicable diseases killed a full 38 million people around the globe in 2012 — 16 million of them under the age of 70.
“Not thousands are dying, but millions are dying ... every year in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, not in their 80s and 90s,” Mendis said.
“It’s beyond belief that it is seemingly invisible,” she told reporters ahead of the report’s launch.
Most of the world’s 16 million premature deaths from non-communicable diseases each year — some 82 percent — occur in poor and middle income countries, and most of them could be avoided with just small investments, the WHO report found.
“The global community has the chance to change the course of the NCD epidemic,” WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a statement.
Millions of lives could be saved if the world over the next decade invests just US$11.2 billion each year, or US$1-3 per person, on promoting healthier habits, according to the WHO report.
Today, some 6 million people die prematurely each year due to tobacco use, 3.3 million deaths are linked to alcohol abuse, 3.2 million to lacking physical activity and 1.7 million to eating too much salt, according to the WHO findings.
A full 42 million children under the age of 5 are considered to be obese, and an estimated 84 percent of adolescents do not get enough exercise, Mendis said, describing such situations as “extremely frightening.”
The international community has staked out nine global targets for shifting unhealthy habits with the aim of slashing premature NCD deaths by a quarter between 2011 and 2025.
Simple and inexpensive steps such as banning advertising of tobacco and alcohol products and taxing foods and drinks that contain high levels of salt and caffeine has already proven successful in a range of countries, WHO said.
In Turkey, for example, an advertising ban on tobacco products combined with significant price hikes and health warnings has pushed smoking rates down 13.4 percent since 2008.
A move in Hungary to tax unhealthy food and drink components heavily has meanwhile led to a 27 percent drop in junk food sales, the WHO report said.
But while some countries have made progress, most others will fall short of the 2025 target, WHO said, warning that inaction would have far-reaching consequences.
“When people fall sick and die in the prime of their lives, productivity suffers, and the cost of treating diseases can be devastating,” the United Nations health agency said.
It has estimated that if nothing is done to improve the situation, premature NCD deaths will suck US$7 trillion out of the global economy over the next decade.
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