In India, new-found wealth has created a huge market for Western-style packaged foods (rife with salt, sugar, trans fats etc.) and helped engineer activity out of daily living. This, in turn, has fuelled an epidemic of high blood pressure, and troubling rates of diabetes and heart disease.
While China’s factories crank out consumer goods for the planet, workers in these plants – who often toil in horrible conditions – are seeing their rates of respiratory illness and cancer soar. The Chinese government also relies heavily on revenues from tobacco sales, which exceed $76-billion a year.
Those realities make it difficult to get buy-in for the simple measures that are required to slow the rate of chronic illnesses.
But we know what those needed measures are: higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol, legislating smoke-free workplaces and public spaces, reducing salt intake, promoting physical activity and better diet, screening for high blood pressure and cervical cancer, immunization against hepatitis B and improving access to basic medications (such as diuretics for high blood pressure, which cost pennies).
The World Health Organization estimates that these measures would cost about $1.20 a person a year on a planetary scale. Yet, as it stands, very little foreign aid goes to health care measures (about 3 per cent of the total) and, in these times of economic turmoil, wealthy countries have little interest in spending more.
In fact, according to a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada was instrumental in watering down the statement that will emerge from the summit on NCDs – notably calling for the removal of a guarantee of basic health care – because of fears it would increase foreign aid budgets.
That is a short-sighted approach. Continuing as we are will result a social and economic burden we can scarcely imagine.
Of course, we’re all going to die some day. Those who live a long life will invariably succumb to a non-communicable disease.
But the goal here is not to help people live forever. Rather, it is to stave off the ravages of illness and disability as long as possible to ensure a good life before a good death.
The only way to do that successfully is to invest in prevention, to invest in people, not diseases. Billions spent wisely today will save trillions tomorrow.
