Martin Henry
OUR LIFESTYLES are killing us! Five lifestyle diseases are accounting for 63 per cent of all deaths annually in Jamaica. These are diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, and cancer.
Rae Barrett, the chief executive officer of the National Health Fund [NHF] should have added AIDS to the list of lifestyle killers when he gave the keynote address last Thursday at the launch of the bikeathon of the Montego Bay Rotary Club. In a sense, most of what is killing us nowadays, including accidents and violence, are lifestyle-related.
Malaria was declared eradicated in Jamaica in 1963, 43 years ago. Younger people won't even know that what is now the National Chest Hospital was built as the George V Sanatorium for tuberculosis cases. There are very few of those around now.
CHRONIC LIFESTYLE
The disease burden of the population has shifted from infectious diseases to chronic lifestyle diseases - the diseases of development. One of the quirky side effects of so-called 'development' is that chronic lifestyle diseases overtake infectious diseases as the leading killers.
There are good reasons for this epidemiological shift, and not all of them negative. With development people consume more processed foods, more saturated fats - and just more food. Physical activity declines. Pace of life increases; stress levels go up - more is not happier. The environment itself, including the food chain, gets more laden with chemicals having negative health effects. And the stage is set for the onset of chronic lifestyle diseases.
But thanks to the major triumphs of public health and preventive medicine, which tend to be the Cinderella of Medicine, people are living longer and therefore with greater exposure to the onset of chronic degenerative diseases. Life expectancy in Jamaica now stands at 75.6 years, This is the highest among countries with medium human development on the human development index of the UNDP and definitely in the First World league. Immunisation, vector control, water treatment, sanitation programmes of the past have subdued infectious diseases pushing up life expectancy by at least a decade since the 1950s.
DISTRESSING NEWS
I come from a patch of rural Jamaica where a simple gravity flow piped water system for the delivery of treated water was set up before my time. It was more than a little distressing when 'Tyrone's Watch' in this Tuesday's Gleaner (May 16) reported that the people of Queensbury in St. Elizabeth have been living without piped water for more than 50 years, which suggests that they had it but lost it.
I am old enough to remember the mosquito spray man who would walk around spraying premises.
They were using DDT then. DDT has since picked up a terrible reputation for environmental damage. But to that 'dangerous' insecticide the world owes a major debt of gratitude for vector control and the control of a bundle of vector-borne infectious diseases like malaria and yellow fever.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Length of life is one thing; quality of life is quite another. There is much that individuals can do to manage their own lifestyles to lower the risks of the onset of chronic, degenerative lifestyle diseases. Some of it very simple and very easy.
The centre of energy of a major wellness movement breaking out here and around the world is alternative medicine. So-called 'scientific medicine' is disease-focussed and quite disregardful of the folk wisdom of the ages for wellness which alternative medicine happily embraces.
At the heart of wellness is living as naturally as possible in peace and contentment as the creator intended and directed. There are pockets of people here and in other places whose lifestyles are adding years to their life and life to their years above that of the general population.
The NHF has 223,000 persons covered for medical assistance with 15 chronic diseases, but the Fund boss is saying 40 per cent of the persons with these conditions are unaware that they are sick! Funded by a heavy tobacco tax of 23 per cent and a payroll deduction of 0.5 per cent, plus contributions from the consolidated fund, the NHF should spend substantial chunks of its copious resources on wellness promotion. We have been altogether too focused on disease.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
