New Delhi: The world has been handed a mixed bag as far as its global health goals go, revealed the latest World Health Statistics, published by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The report, that tracks the world’s progress to attaining the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), showed that more than half the people worldwide don’t get the required essential health services, mortality of children under the age of five remains rampant and low-to-middle-income countries (LMCs) like India are responsible for a majority of deaths from non-communicable diseases.
As the report says, one very clear aspiration of the SDG is to “leave no one behind”. However, countries like India lag behind as certain diseases, both infectious and non-communicable, are a burden far higher than the global average.
The report showed that 13 million people died worldwide, before the age of 70, from cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, diabetes and cancer. Most of the deaths were in LMCs.
In India alone, 23.3 percent people died from these NCDs between the ages of 30 and 70 in 2016. This is higher than the global average of 18 percent in the same year 2016.
Low-to-middle-income countries had almost double the burden of high income countries and the number of deaths were increasing due to population growth, ageing. This puts in jeopardy the target to reduce by 2030, one-third of all premature mortalities.
India’s numbers for tuberculosis were no surprise — 211 cases of TB per 100000 population in 2016. The WHO wants to eradicate TB by 2030, while India through its national programme wants to do so by 2025.
The world average spending on healthcare was around 11.7 percent of the household expenditure in 2010. In India, between 2007 and 2015, 17.3 percent people spent over the world average.
India’s maternal mortality ratio was 174 deaths per 100,000 births in 2015. The SDG for 2030 is to lower MMR for all countries to less than 70 per 100,000 births. LMC countries like India, said the report accounted for 99 percent of the 3,03,000 women who died during childbirth in 2015.
India’s poor track record with air pollution also came up, as it has the second highest annual mean levels of fine particulate matter in the South-East Asia region, behind Nepal.
With 38.4 percent of stunted children under five and 21 percent children under five suffering wasting, India also racked up the count for malnutrition in the region. South-East Asia and the African region, said the report, contained three quarters of the 151 million stunted children under five in 2017.
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