GCC officials focus on NCDs

Prevention and treatment of noncommunicable diseases was on top of the agenda of the three-day GCC health officials meeting, which began yesterday in Riyadh.
Tawfik Khoja, executive director of the GCC Health Ministers Secretariat, said the focus on the noncommunicable diseases is timely to curtail the growing incidence of the diseases in the region. The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean is implementing the UN political declaration on noncommunicable diseases in the region.
Calling the spread of noncommunicable diseases a socioeconomic and development challenge of “epidemic proportions,” governments pledged to work with the United Nations to set targets in combating heart disease, cancers, diabetes and lung disease, and to devise voluntary policies that cut smoking and slash the high salt, sugar and fat content in foods that caused them.
In the short-term, increased incidences of NCDs will increase per capita health care costs, causing health insurance claims to rise for these patients.
The meeting is set to review and adopt a set of monitoring indicators for noncommunicable disease surveillance systems and share strategies, tools and cost-effective interventions that countries in the region may have implemented in relation to surveillance, prevention and improved health care for noncommunicable diseases.
The average life expectancy has increased in the Eastern Mediterranean in general from 51 years in 1970 to about 70 years. Mortality rates of children under the age of five have come down from 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 68 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2008.
Other technical subjects that will be taken up for discussion include health care in general, patient safety, mental health, anti-smoking, occupational health, organ transplantation, school health and health of adolescents and young people.
Discussions will also be held on the Dubai Declaration on saving the lives of mothers and children and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, as well as to evaluate the Orthopedic and Sports Medicine resolutions moved in Doha.
Khoja said the meeting will map out the agenda for the 70th GCC health ministers meeting scheduled to be held in Geneva in May. The meeting is to be held on the sidelines of the general assembly of the WHO this year.
The executive board of the Health Ministers’ Council for GCC States in a report published in 2005 said that cervical cancer is the 11th most common cancer in the GCC states. The report further shows that between January 1998 and December 2005, there were 1,314 cervical cancer cases reported from all GCC states, accounting for 1.8 percent of all cancer cases and 3.6 percent of cancer casess among women.
The overall cervical cancer rate for women in all GCC states was 3 per 100,000 of the population. Qatar reported the highest incidence of cervical cancer (8.4 per 100,000 women) followed by Oman (7.8), Bahrain (6.5), UAE (5.9), Kuwait (4.5), and Saudi Arabia (2.2). The UAE’s Cancer Registry Program revealed that the annual average of the reported cervical cancer cases had tripled in 2005 when compared with that from 1998-2004.
According to a recent NCB report, by 2015 the Kingdom’s population will reach an estimated 31.69 million. The growth rate for Saudi nationals will continue to rise, while the proportion of expatriates will increase at a decelerated rate in comparison to previous influxes spurred by economic booms.
The significance of this demographic shift is that Saudis have developed a predisposition to lifestyle diseases that will translate into an expensive medical profile requiring complex treatment over the long-term. This will increase demand for enhanced medical facilities.