China faces a health emergency of “hidden epidemics” of noncommunicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes that could have far-reaching social, economic and demographic consequences.
Experts have warned of the deadly impact of noncommunicable diseases in China on the way of life of Chinese people in recent decades, according to a report from the newspaper.The Guardian“.
Thanks to the industrial revolution, China witnessed an economic miracle that moved millions of people from the countryside to modern urban cities and lifted them from poverty to a better standard of living.
And due to the new lifestyle, diseases such as cancer associated with very high rates of smoking, diabetes and heart disease have emerged thanks to an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise and high blood pressure.
For University of California sociology professor Wang Feng, the pace of change in China in the 1980s and 1990s is unlike anything seen anywhere else in history.
“These are hidden epidemics,” he said. “The explosion of a new diet coupled with unexpected and unprecedented aging will be a major challenge for China, not only for individual families, but also for political leadership.”
“This problem can really explode and lose control. This isn’t something that’s going to go away.”
More than a third of the world’s 1.1 billion smokers live in China, where about half of the male population is addicted to tobacco.
According to current projections, smoking-related diseases – which include lung cancer, respiratory and heart disease – will kill one in three Chinese youth by 2050.
This sad statistic comes in a country that is already facing a demographic crisis due to its low birth rate and rapidly aging population.
The United Nations predicts that the population could drop from the current level of 1.4 billion to around one billion by 2100.
Chinese officials said in July that the population was already starting to shrink, with birth rates dropping to their lowest levels in decades.
But some predictions are more stringent, with separate research in the United States and China suggesting the population will almost halve by the end of the century to around 730 million.
A health problem means an economic problem.
Professor Bernard Stewart, a cancer expert at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, said the evidence was overwhelming and that China must act to prevent what he called a looming “disaster”.
“It makes no sense to describe the disaster China is facing in terms of smoking deaths. There is a huge difference in rates between provinces, but highly industrialized cities are disaster areas,” he added.
According to the Global Burden of Disease study prepared by the American Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, the leading cause of death in China is stroke, followed by heart disease, chronic lung disease and lung cancer, and smoking is a contributing factor. contributes in many of these cases.
Cardiovascular disease is also a leading cause of death in China, especially in the highly industrialized and urbanized north.
A study conducted by the journal “Lancet” found that people in that region are more likely to have high blood pressure, obesity and a poor diet that contains few fruits and vegetables and a high percentage of red meat.
China has more diabetes than any other country – more than 110 million – in what the World Health Organization has described as an “explosive” problem. That number will rise to 150 million people with diabetes by mid-century.
According to the World Health Organization, diabetes and its complications already contribute to nearly one million deaths in China each year, with more than 40 percent of these deaths classified as premature, another cause for concern.
And the increase in these chronic diseases places a great economic burden on the country, which has the second largest economy in the world after the United States.
In 2021, a group of academics wrote in the medical journal The Lancet: “Chronic conditions contribute significantly to the health burden, the inequality of health outcomes and the economic burden in China.”
One of the study’s authors, Barbara McPeak, a health economist at the University of Melbourne, says families are facing dire consequences from the problem of “growing hidden epidemics” in China.
He added: “The expenses incurred by people with chronic diseases are significant. You have a health problem means there is an economic problem.”
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