Asia remains hot spot for anemia prevalence
Anemia remains a major global public health problem with nearly 2.3 billion people suffering from it – an estimated 50 percent of which is due to iron deficiency anemia (IDA).
Southeast Asia and Africa continue to have the highest prevalence of anemia – accounting for 85 percent of the burden affecting mainly women and children.
The situation has spurred international leading experts on iron and blood health, together with medical practitioners, to hold Anemia Convention 2017, the first scientific symposium on anemia spearheaded by global healthcare company Merck.
The convention recently held at The Peninsula Manila in Makati drew over a hundred participants from Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines while renowned experts from Canada, Austria, Germany and Australia flew in to discuss growing concerns over anemia especially since it continues to be one of the most pressing health issues in Asia.
The World Health Assembly has adopted a comprehensive implementation plan to achieve six global nutrition targets with one of the specific aims being to achieve a 50-percent reduction in the rate of anemia in women of reproductive age by 2025.
Prof. Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta, chair in global child health at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto as well as founding director of the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health at the Aga Khan University and keynote lecturer in the Anemia Convention, noted the staggering statistics on anemia and its prevalence in Asia.
“When you look at the maps of the distribution patterns of anemia, in infants and children from the most recent estimates that we have, it’s not too difficult to see that the vast majority of the world’s regions affected are the regions we are sitting in – South Asia, South Central Asia, Southeast Asia and also Africa,” Bhutta said.
“In numeric terms, if you look at women of reproductive age between 15 and 49, the figure becomes a little bit more dramatic. In Southeast Asia, there are 202 million affected women with anemia and in the Western Pacific, about 100 million,” he added.
Some 41.8 percent of pregnant women and almost 600 million preschool and school-age children globally are anemic. Nearly 60 percent of the cases involving pregnant women and around half of the child cases are attributable to iron deficiency, according to Bhutta.
He cited The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (University of Washington): The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors (GBD) 2010 Study as showing that at a global level and between 1990 and 2010, the burden that the world had with concomitant iron deficiency anemia and related to nutritional factors remains large.
Iron deficiency is the most common nutrient deficiency globally with approximately four to five billion people suffering from it. As WHO has stated, “It constitutes a public health condition of epidemic proportions.”
“In Asia, the high prevalence is due to malnutrition and parasitic infestation,” said Dr. Corazon Zaida Gamilla, one of the convention speakers and chairman of the obgyn department at the University of Santo Tomas Hospital.