Modern menaces become top health threats
AIR pollution, obesity and vaccine hesitancy are three of the biggest threats to human health, the World Health Organisation has said.
In a belated set of new year resolutions, the WHO listed the 10 greatest health threats and set out how it will tackle them over the next 12 months, moving away from a focus on “traditional” disease.
The list is a sign that global health is changing and non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and environmental threats pose just as great a risk as infectious diseases such as Ebola and HIV.
Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in the US, said the list was a good overview of the threats.
“Having a list like this helps to drive research and innovation and it’s a way of conceptualising something that’s complex. Often diseases can get blown out of proportion and people need to understand what the true risks are,” he said. He added that the inclusion of “vaccine hesitancy” – refusal or reluctance to have vaccinations – was important.
He said: “If you’d done that list 100 years ago it would have been all infectious diseases. The reasons why it’s not is because of vaccines. People didn’t have the luxury of dying from diabetes, obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Vaccines are probably one of the greatest technologies to have impacted on human health.”
A spokesman for the WHO said: “These issues were included for various reasons – some diseases we have made significant progress with, such as TB and HIV, yet they remain significant health threats: HIV still kills one million people a year.
“Others, such as dengue [a mosquito-borne disease], are seeing transmission periods lengthening and some countries like Bangladesh are seeing more dengue deaths than they have in years,” he said. Awareness of the dangers of air pollution has been heightened in recent months and the WHO estimates that around 9 out of 10 people breathe polluted air every day. It estimates seven million people die prematurely every year from diseases caused by lung pollution.
Climate change is also predicted to kill an estimated 250,000 people between 2030 and 2050.
Larissa Lockwood, the head of health at Global Action Plan, a charity campaigning on clean air, said the WHO should work with governments. She said: “In the UK the Government has recognised the importance of engaging people on air pollution – and we welcome that – but this is woefully underfunded compared to what is spent on other public health information campaigns such as obesity, heart disease and cancer.”
Dr Rachel Lowe, an expert on dengue at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the disease had long been neglected, despite around 40 per cent of the world’s population being at risk of contracting the debilitating flu-like illness.