E-Kantipur

KATHMANDU, FEB 10 -

Nepal is facing a health crisis with rising rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which disproportionately affect poor families, with possible side effects of disability and premature death, and worsening poverty, a new report on health risk warns.

The new World Bank report—Capitalising on Demographic Transition: Tackling Non-communicable Diseases in South Asia—says heart disease in the region is now the leading cause of death among people aged 15-69, and that South Asians suffer their first heart attacks six years earlier than other groups worldwide. The report also cites that NCDs have already become the largest health burden in Nepal, accounting for 60 percent of lives lost due to ill health, disability, and early death. The burden of NCDs will proportionally rise in the future, in part, due to further aging of the population with 5.8 percent of the population expected to be over the age of 65 by 2025.

Nepal is also susceptible to risk factors of NCDs including smoking and alcohol consumption. Tobacco use among women is the highest among South Asian countries at 28 percent while smoking prevalence among youth is among the highest at 13 percent for boys and 5 percent for girls. The prevalence of hazardous and harmful drinking is also high. “This unfair burden is especially harsh on poor people, who, after heart attacks, face lifelong major illnesses, have to pay for their medical care out of their savings or by selling their possessions, and then find themselves caught in a poverty trap where they neither can get better nor work,” says co-author Michael Engelgau, M.D., a World Bank Senior Public Health Specialist on secondment from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the report, with average life expectancy in Nepal now at 67 years and rising, people are getting older without better living conditions, healthier nutrition, rising incomes and access to good healthcare that benefited older people in developed countries in previous decades.

As a result, Nepalis are becoming more vulnerable to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity, creating significant new pressures on health systems to treat and care for them.

The report encourages Nepal to adopt and carry out a number of country and regional approaches to reduce both unhealthy risk factors in its general population and control heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other NCDs.

According to Consultant Cardiologist at Bir Hospital, Dr. Prakash Raj Regmi, NCDs have now been shifting from aged people to younger, from wealthy people to poor. Statistics show that 10 years ago, NCDs used to be a mere 20 percent of the whole disease spectrum, when communicable diseases used to exceed 80 percent. But now,

NCDs stand to be 49 percent, while communicable disease stand to be 51

percent.

“Figures show that NCDs have been increasing dramatically in the country. If preventive measures are not taken now, NCDs will become epidemic by 2020,” said Dr. Regmi. He added that the main cause of rapid increase in NCDs was unhealthy lifestyle. If NCDs are to be controlled, there needs to be reduction in risk factors like smoking, imbalanced diet, obesity and mental stress so as to curb NCDs by 90 percent.

Sound the alarm, another physician at Kathmandu Model College, Dr. Arpana Neupane said, “The government has to give high priority to contain NCDs by allocating budget and making special separate programmes if it wants to prevent the worst situation in future.”    

Posted on: 2011-02-10 08:52

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