From Washington D.C.'s Department of Health Page

According to a recent study, the estimated number of people living with Diabetes is now at 347 million worldwide. This figure shows that the prevalence of this chronic condition has doubled since 1980.  With 2.7 million participants, this study was the largest of its kind for diabetes. It was led by Majid Ezzati, from Britain’s Imperial College London, and Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard School of Public Health and the results were published in the Lancet.  Diabetes is a progressive condition that can affect all the organ systems of the body leading to serious complications like heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, nerve damage, and blindness. It is as a metabolic ailment in which the body fails to adequately move sugar from the blood stream into tissues.  Diabetes comes in two forms.  Type 1 is an autoimmune disease that is usually acquired in childhood to early adulthood and requires the person with type I to take insulin for their rest of their life in order to survive.  Type 2 accounts for 90 percent of diabetic cases and is more common to develop after the age of 25, even though it is becoming more common for those younger than 25 to develop the metabolic disease. It is controlled by insulin, oral medication and, for some people, it can be controlled with weight loss and exercise.

The WHO defines Non-Communicable Diseases as including:

• cardiovascular disease
• diabetes
• cancers and
• chronic lung diseases

According to the WHO, 36 million of the 57 million global deaths in 2008 were due to Non-Communicable Diseases. Of these deaths due to Non-Communicable Diseases in low- and middle income countries in 2008, 29% occurred before the age of 60. Further, 80% of premature heart disease, stroke and diabetes can be prevented.

With the upcoming UN High Level Meeting on NCDs, there is a current opportunity for a renewed focus and action against Non-Communicable Diseases. For more, check out this recent article from The Huffington Post.

In the book Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, Irwin Sherman describes how microbes have impacted populations, altered history, devastated populations, felled great thinkers and, in the process, transformed politics, public health, and economics. He discusses how smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, AIDS, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, hemophilia, porphyria, and the plant disease behind the Irish Potato Famine have altered history in an informing and entertaining manner.

US News and World Report interviewed Sherman about his book and about What Disease Mean in the Modern World. A related article from Nursing Degree.net’s blog entitled 10 Diseases That Totally Changed the World similarly discusses the ways in which diseases have impacted the course of history.

Check out the upcoming Global Pulse issue on “Long-Term Care” in April 2011. If you feel inspired from the issue, consider writing a blog post for this upcoming contest.

With the September 2011 United Nations High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) approaching, the CSIS Global Health Policy Center wants to focus on the opportunities and challenges of confronting the global epidemic of chronic diseases. In addition to the series of high level speakers coming to CSIS to speak on the topic, they want to hear from you! They will be posting questions in the upcoming months for you to respond to. The winning blog entries will be featured on their home page of our website, SmartGlobalHealth.org.

Their first question of the blog contest is:
What should be the key priority of the upcoming UN High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases and why?

For more information on the contest’s rules or to submit your entry, please visit: http://smartglobalhealth.org/BlogContest

According to the World Health Organization, non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, account for 60% of deaths worldwide, claiming more than 35 million lives per year. In all regions of the world except Africa, mortality rates among men and women age 15 to 59 are higher for non-communicable diseases than for communicable diseases. Further, The World Economic Forum recently highlighted the economic costs of non-communicable diseases, naming this health threat as one of the three most likely and severe risks to the global economy alongside fiscal crises and asset bubbles, a form of inflation. Yet despite this significant impact, non-communicable diseases tend to be overlooked and underfunded. For example, a Center for Global Development report estimates that less than 1% of public and private health funding is allocated to the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries. In response to this need for a greater focus on non-communicable diseases globally, a recent United Nations resolution has been introduced calling for a summit on non-communicable diseases “in order to develop strategic responses to these diseases and their repercussions.”

The CEOs of the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and the American Diabetes Association comment on this issue in a recent (5/13) CNN opinion article.

Many news articles have been written recently on the increase in the prevalence in chronic diseases across the globe.  Rapid economic development is seen as one possible cause of the swift spread of chronic diseases in the developing world.

Let’s take the increase in the prevalence of Diabetes Type II for example. China has nearly 250 million and India has about 50 million people with Diabetes and prediabetes.  It is estimated that by 2030, 366 million or 6% or the world’s population will have Diabetes. This condition has two different modes of contraction, one for the wealthy, mainly being obesity resulting from over-nutrition, and another for the poor via changes in the amount of exercise and diet that once consisted mainly of vegetables but now has switched to foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat.    The change of diet is a direct result of the increase in the numbers of people moving from villages to cities in search of work.  A study found that the influence of urbanization and change of living habits have a greater influence than genetic predisposition for  determining whether a person develops Diabetes Type II, these migrants were twice more likely to have hypertension and to have higher blood sugar than villagers.

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The Global Health Alliance is seeking to spear the fight against chronic diseases world-wide. For full story, read here. What do you think are some differences between ‘implementation science’ as mentioned in the article and ‘translational science’? Is it only a matter of whether evidence-based medicine and/or bench research is applied to an individual patient or a larger patient population?