Prevention still far better than cure

People at risk of contracting non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes and cancer must take the necessary precautions in screening themselves for risk factors, a senior health official said on Monday. Quoting a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, Dr Mahmoud Fikri, Assistant Undersecretary of Health Policies Affairs at the Ministry of Health and Chair of Higher National Committee for Diabetes, said prevention is the only effective way of curtailing the spread of long-term diseases, which are expected to be responsible for 67 per cent of all deaths in the UAE in 2011. "In addition, people also need to follow closely the advice of their primary health care physicians, who can warn them of risk factors like obesity, smoking and insufficient physical activity," Fikri said at the the MEED Arabian Public Health Forum 2011 where medical experts and health care officials met to discuss the growing threat of NCDs. Speaking to Gulf News on the sidelines of the forum, Fikri stressed on the need for people to watch out for risk factors even when they believe themselves to be healthy. "Despite growing awareness about the risks of an unhealthy lifestyle, we have a rise in physical inactivity and tobacco use among [the] youth. This means that people need to take risk factors seriously, even when they occur in children, because NCDs cannot be cured after they are diagnosed," Fikri said. "The idea that diseases can be controlled once they occur needs to change into people working to avoid them in the first place," he added. According to another WHO report discussed at the forum, 37 per cent of children in the UAE between the ages of 12 and 16 years were found to be overweight in 2010, up from 21.5 per cent for the same age group in 2005. Obesity for the same group also increased from 12 per cent in 2005 to 15.5 per cent. Dr Salman Rawaf, professor of public health, said that the push towards healthy living in the Arab world needs to start from birth.