From New York to Cannes: baby steps in the battle against non-communicable diseases

A two-day United Nations summit on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases - its very first one - has just ended in New York with a whimper rather than a bang.

The heads of state and government, senior ministers and experts who attended the meeting took some baby steps to get started but far too few to address the urgency and magnitude of the challenge the world now confronts. Led by the "big four" - cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung diseases - NCDs caused 36 million deaths, or about two-thirds of the global total, in 2008. A joint study by Harvard Public Health and the World Economic Forum estimates that NCDs will cost $47-trillion from 2010 to 2030.

Because the big four NCDs share the main risk factors of unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use and harmful use of alcohol, a list of "best buys" interventions developed by the World Health Organization - such as reducing tobacco, salt and trans fats and improving education and universal access to basic medicines and technologies - could counter the NCD pandemics for a price to governments of only $11-billion a year. But the leaders in New York did not buy this bargain.

Their cash-strapped governments, health systems and businesses, still recovering from the continuing financial crisis, are all in intense fiscal consolidation mode. More important, the problem and its cure seem much too broad. The NCD pandemic is not caused by an identifiable virus but from the same technological and economic progress that has enabled major population growth and helped address significant health problems of the past. These problems are now overshooting the limits of human biology, as the NCD pandemic is spreading faster among the poor than the rich. It's critical to bridge today's divide between health-system capacity-building and the many facets of agricultural and economic development.

Needed now is a full-fledged whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach that accounts for the complexity of individuals' motivations and behaviour and of the social, economic and health-care professions, organizations and systems that support individuals in health, disease and everyday life. In New York, the leaders mouthed these fine phrases and principles. But they put neither new money nor a credible strategy on the table to back them up...

John Kirton is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the co-director of the G20 Research Group at the Munk School for Global Affairs. Laurette Dubé is the James McGill Chair of Consumer and Lifestyle Psychology and Marketing at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University and the scientific director of the McGill World Platform for Health and Economic Convergence.

Read full article: The Globe and Mail, September 21, 2011

Read related article: The Gazette