The noncommunicable disease community is unlikely to get everything it was hoping for out of the United Nations High-Level Meeting on NCDs next week, but its leading spokesperson is upbeat nonetheless. “Even if nothing happens in New York, the fact that people are aware of diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases ... that there will be a political declaration - a political statement - coming out of New York stating that diabetes and other NCDs are serious, is an achievement in itself,” International Diabetes Federation president Jean Claude Mbanya said at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
The upcoming 5th edition of the IDF Diabetes Atlas, to be released on November 14th - World Diabetes Day - will include the data that there are 366 million people living with diabetes and 4.6 million deaths due to diabetes – one death every 7 seconds – at a cost of $465 billion spent on diabetes care. In contrast, the last IDF Diabetes Atlas, released in 2009, put the prevalence figure at 285 million. “The cost of not doing something about diabetes is more than the benefit,” said Dr. Mbanya, who noted that IDF is releasing those few figures in advance of the UN NCD summit because “We don’t want the world leaders to forget about diabetes, which is the tsunami of the 21st century.”
In the Political Declaration, which will probably not change during the UN meeting, member states have agreed to establishing NCD plans and policies that create partnerships, to reducing salts and sugars and eliminate industrially produced trans fats in all foods, to increase access to affordable, quality-assured medicines and technologies, to strengthen health care systems to include integration of NCD prevention and treatment, and to increase resources for NCDs. The document also contains an agreement to develop a comprehensive global monitoring framework for NCDs in 2012, and a set of voluntary global targets and indicators.
Items that IDF and the NCD Alliance had pushed for that didn’t make it into the Declaration because of opposition based primarily on budgetary concerns included the specific target of a 25% reduction of NCD deaths by 2025, and a requirement for monitoring. “We think we need targets and measurements. What gets measured is what gets done,” Dr. Mbanya commented.
But, the UN summit 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. Because many countries base funding decisions on the MDGs, inclusion of NCDs there would be another huge step forward, he said.
For now though, “just getting heads of states to hold a summit on NCDs is an achievement in itself. This will be only the second summit on health after [the 2001 summit on HIV/AIDS]. So, we have achieved something. We have attracted the world’s attention.”
--By Miriam E. Tucker