Bird Flu is expected to be one of the top items discussed for the third straight year at the World Health Organization’s annual Asia-Pacific regional meeting. However, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark stresses on Monday that Asia-Pacific nations must not overlook obesity and tobacco as major killers when focusing on infectious diseases such as SARS and Bird Flu that affect the region.
“Obesity is a time bomb for New Zealand and the Pacific,” Clark, a former health Minister, said at the opening of the WHO meeting in Auckland. “It is posing huge challenges to our health systems, as we grapple with increasing rates of the associated diabetes, renal and eye disease and joint problems,” Clark added.
Over the next decade, deaths from chronic diseases are expected to jump 20 percent, with diabetes-related deaths alone increasing 51 percent, said Anders Nordstrom, the World Health Organization’s acting director general. “Most of this can be prevented through healthy diet, regular physical activity and avoidance of tobacco products,” he said.
Tobacco is responsible for more than 3,000 deaths a day in the Asia-Pacific. China alone has more than 300 million adult smokers and the Asia-Pacific region has the fastest growing number of children who smoke, Nordstrom said. “Smoking causes utterly preventable death, disease and disability,” said Clark. “It cheats our people of the good health to which we all have a right. It is a scourge the World could do without.”
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