The World Health Organization made a foray into the pre-pandemic world on Wednesday, revealing that 7 in ten of the diseases that killed the most people in 2019 were noncommunicable conditions and heart disease first.
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This is almost twice as much as in 2000 when only 4 non-communicable diseases were in the ranking of the 10 most deadly, underlines a report from the UN agency covering the period 2000-2019.
For 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in China a year ago and has since claimed more than 1.5 million officially recorded deaths and hundreds of millions of sick, could upset the ranking.
But the death toll still pales in comparison to the death toll of nearly 9 million people who died of heart disease last year.
They were 7 million in 2000, and “heart disease now accounts for 16% of all causes of death,” said the WHO, adding that if the situation is improving in Europe at large (15% fewer deaths in During the period, the Western Pacific region alone recorded more than half of the additional 2 million deaths.
The fact that noncommunicable diseases are so prominent on the list “clearly highlights the need to step up efforts to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease”, explains the WHO.
These figures “underline the urgency to drastically improve the primary care system in a fair and holistic manner,” underlined the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“A strong primary care system is obviously the foundation on which everything rests, from the fight against noncommunicable diseases to the management of a pandemic,” he insisted.
A total of 55.4 million people died in 2019, 55% of them from one of the 10 deadliest diseases last year.
Just behind cardiovascular disease are, in descending order, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (lung disease causing difficulty in breathing), lung infections and neonatal disease.
Next come lung cancer, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, diarrhea, diabetes and finally kidney disease.
Statistics presented on Wednesday show that people are living longer in 2019 than in 2000 – 73 years on average compared to 67 – but not necessarily in better health.
For diabetics whose numbers have skyrocketed since 2000 (+ 70%), the problem is less a cure – insulin was discovered almost a century ago – but only half of the people who need it have it. access, said Bente Mikkelsen, WHO Noncommunicable Disease Officer.
For her, one of the most effective means to protect people against this disease: taxes on tobacco and sugary drinks for example.
“It is also very important to increase health budgets,” she stressed.
“Only a portion of the gains in life expectancy over the past twenty years are due to healthier living,” said Bochen Cao, who is part of the WHO division responsible for collecting and analyzing the data.
AIDS fell from 8th to 19th place in the overall ranking. It remains the fourth leading cause of death on the African continent even though the death toll fell from more than 1 million in 2000 to 435,000 twenty years later.
Tuberculosis suffered the same fate (now in thirteenth place) thanks to a 30% drop in the number of deaths caused by the disease which generally affects the lungs.
In general, communicable diseases play a more important role in poor countries, accounting for six of the 10 deadliest diseases: malaria (sixth rank), tuberculosis (eighth rank) and AIDS in ninth.
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