World Health Organization:
Developing World Needs to Cut Heart Disease

Developing countries must promote healthy lifestyles from childhood to halt rising obesity and heart disease rates, medical experts with the World Health Organization (WHO) said on September 23. The appeal came ahead of annual World Heart Day, being celebrated on September 26 under the theme of "Children, Adolescents and Heart Disease."

Heart disease and strokes, the primary cardiovascular diseases, killed 17 million people in 2003 or one-third of deaths worldwide, according to WHO and the World Heart Federation.
Risk factors such as smoking and diabetes are on the rise and 18 million children aged under five are already overweight, the WHO said in its ”Atlas of Heart Disease and Stroke,” issued on Sept. 23.

"It is critical to the health of future generations that each country find resources and political will to tackle the cardiovascular disease epidemic now," Janet Voute, head of the World Heart Federation, said at a news briefing.

Judith Mackay, co-author of the Atlas and a physician based in Hong Kong, said that 75 percent of the victims of heart disease live in developing countries.

"It is for all the combination of reasons that have occurred in the West. There are more elevators now in Asia, more cars and more buses, more fast food, more sugar eaten," Mackay told Reuters. "Under China's one-child policy ... one problem is that one child has become extremely precious, particularly boy children who become little emperors. They tend to get fed an awful lot," she added.

Source: Reuters, Sept. 23, 2004

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