Pharma Leads the Charge on NCDs

A disaster in slow motion; that is how Dr Githinji Gitahi, CEO of African health NGO AMREF, describes the threat of non-communicable diseases (NCDs).Long thought of as diseases of the richer countries, the threat of NCDs – including cancer, diabetes and hypertension – is growing in low-to-middle-income countries, which now account for three-quarters of the annual death toll of more than 40 million.A toxic mix of modernization, urbanization and lifestyle changes has seen this growth in NCDs in developing countries, a scenario that has already played out in developed countries, where smoking, alcohol, processed food and increasingly sedentary lifestyles have taken their toll on people ’s health.However, while citizens of countries like the US, Britain and Japan have access to robust healthcare systems that diagnose and treat NCDs, patients in the developing world have far fewer resources on which to fall back. What ’s more, the growing pressure of NCDs is pushing already over-stretched healthcare systems to breaking point.Now, governments, NGOs and pharma are coming together to tackle the problem, including at a recent conference in Geneva – The Blueprint for Success – supported by Takeda.Hitting the gasOne of the UN ’s Sustainable Development Goals is to cut deaths from NCDs by a third by 2030, a challenge that has been taken up by Access Accelerated, a partnership of 23 pharmaceutical companies, the World Bank and the Union for International Cancer Control.Along...

Source: EyeForPharma - June 21, 2017 Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Anonymous Source Type: news