Commission looks at women’s roles in preventing diseases
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), also called chronic diseases, are diseases which cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Mostly hypertension, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes, these are caused by multiple interacting factors, called shared risk factors, that work together over the course of many years, to cause the condition.
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These diseases pose a great challenge to sustainable development and human rights and this was recognised by world leaders at the UN General Assembly in 2011 as one of the major challenges against sustainable development in the 21st century.
Number one killers
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), NCDs are by far the leading causes of death and the world’s number one killers. They account for over 36 million deaths annually, with nearly 80 per cent of the deaths occurring in low and middle-income countries, with more than 9,000,000 of all NCD deaths occurring before the age of 60.
In Ghana, the NCD Control Programme (NCDCP), which is within the Disease Control Department (DCD), Public Health Division of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), is mandated among other things, to ensure that the burden of NCDs (morbidity and mortality) is reduced to the barest minimum, so as to render it of little public health importance and prevent it from becoming an obstacle to socio-economic development
For instance, in 2012, statistics from Globocan, an affiliate of the WHO, indicated that NCDs accounted for over 82,000 deaths in Ghana annually.
The UN General Assembly High Level meeting on NCDs in 2011 maintained that since women continue to face numerous barriers to accessing integrated health care for NCD prevention and care, there was the need to capture a new story on how NCDs undermined development and human rights, and to mobilise women’s movement towards the promotion of that objective.
Ghana’s side event
At the just-ended 60th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW60), the Permanent Mission of Ghana to the UN organised a side event on the theme, “Time for action: Women mobilising against non-communicable diseases” to elicit input from stakeholders, and prompt the mobilisation of women for the prevention and control of NCDs, and deliberate on how to include NCDs in other development efforts and agenda.
Chaired by Ghana’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Mrs Martha Pobee, the event, facilitated by Dr Veronica Magar, Team Leader, Gender Equity and Human Rights, WHO, attracted keynote speakers and experts.
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Ghana’s Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, who was a keynote speaker, said dealing with NCDs was a key development issue for the global community, especially those in the developing world, describing NCDs not only as a health issue, but also as a broad development issue that could undermine the attainment of Goal Five of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which seeks to achieve gender equality and women empowerment.
She said institutional data indicated an increasing rate of NCDs in the country, hence the need to give the issue high priority, stressing that health experts continued to advocate good eating habits that include eating fruits and vegetables and regenerative health care, engaging in physical activities regularly and the need for women’s groups to be part of the process in playing their roles effectively, to help scale up the campaign against NCDs.
Deaths from NCDs
Another keynote speaker, Dr Bente Mikkelsen of the WHO said the deaths recorded from NCDs indicated that little progress was being made to reduce the cases, despite huge commitments by all heads of states, pointing out that, of critical importance was the fact that patients died from NCDs in their young and productive ages.
Describing Ghana’s story as fascinating, she said it was the starting point that could yield positive results,and that there was no time to apportion blame. She rather called for proactive steps from all involved to attain the desired results.
The panellists, Ms Krishanti Dharmaraj, Director, Centre for Women’s Global Leadership;, the Chief Executive of Women Deliver, Ms Katja Iversen and the Director of the Programme Division, Ms Maria Noel Vaeza, as well as the Executive Director of O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health, Mr Oscar Cabrera and Ms Kaitlin Yarnall, the Deputy Director, National Geographic Society, contributed to the discussions on the need for women to mobilise against NCDs and add their voice to the debate on how to advance the NCD agenda.