NEW YORK – The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a political declaration on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases.
The declaration emerged from a UN high-level meeting that was only the second-ever to address a health issue, the first being on HIV/AIDS in 2001. It states that "the global burden and threat of NCDs [noncommunicable diseases] constitutes one of the major challenges for development in the twenty-first century, which undermines social and economic development throughout the world."
Miriam E. Tucker/Elsevier Global Medical News
The U.N. General Assembly has declared noncommunicable diseases to be one of the "major challenges for development in the twenty-first century."
According to the World Health Organization, 63% of deaths worldwide are due to NCDs such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer, and nearly 80% of those deaths occur in developing countries.
Although the declaration doesn’t contain everything that noncommunicable disease lobbyists had hoped for, the document is nonetheless seen as a significant first step toward prompting global action to combat NCDs.
Member states agreed to measures such as reducing salts and sugars and eliminating industrially produced trans fats in all foods, increasing access to affordable, quality-assured medicines and technologies, and strengthening health care systems to include integration of NCD prevention and treatment. Beyond the health sector, there was also general agreement that success would need to involve many sectors beyond health, including finance, agriculture, transportation, urban development, and trade.
The U.N. General Assembly also tasked the World Health Organization with setting up a comprehensive global monitoring framework and preparing recommendations for voluntary global targets before the end of 2012.
The NCD community, led by the nongovernmental coalition called the NCD Alliance, had pushed for specific targets, including a 25% reduction of NCD deaths by 2025. But the current declaration isn’t the last step. There will be another evaluation in 2014, just in advance of the scheduled 2015 revision of the Millennium Development Goals, according to the alliance’s director Ann Keeling.