NigeriansTalk

Cross-posted here.

Maybe by now, some of you have fig­ured out beyond my pen­chant Nol­ly­wood, the mind­less sput­ter­ings (made-up word, I think) of old Igbo men — such as this one and oh man, this one — I also have some inter­est in chronic dis­ease man­age­ment out­side of the West (it’s a bud­ding inter­est, but an inter­est, no less). Even dis­eases tra­di­tion­ally thought of as acute (mean­ing you either get over it or die really quickly) are increas­ingly requir­ing a par­a­digm shift towards long-term care (namely, AIDS). Unfor­tu­nately, poor health infra­struc­ture means that it is next to impos­si­ble to address such chronic dis­ease care issues in the devel­op­ing world.  The recent health saga still unfold­ing with our nation’s (for­mer?) pres­i­dent serves as case-in-point.  When it comes to address­ing com­plex chronic dis­ease, the shut­tling of our indi­genes to for­eign hos­pi­tals is, under­stand­ably, all too common.

Devel­op­ing nations find them­selves in dou­ble jeop­ardy — bat­tling acute infec­tious dis­eases while remain­ing hor­ri­bly unpre­pared to face the ris­ing threats of “first-world” health issues such as car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, can­cer, motor vehi­cle acci­dents, men­tal ill­ness, etc. Large-scale disease-centric inter­ven­tions, at times, serves to weaken over­all health infra­struc­ture, plac­ing focus (and fund­ing) on one or two dis­eases to the neglect of oth­ers — most often­times non-communicable dis­eases (NCDs). Con­sider NCDs as the lat­est addi­tion to the cat­e­gory of Neglected Trop­i­cal Dis­eases (NTDs).

A recent study pub­lished in the the jour­nal, PLoS med­i­cine (H/T Kaiser Daily Global Health Pol­icy Report) found that high NCD bur­den served as a major bar­rier to achiev­ing the UN’s Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals (MDGs), which excludes NCDs among its list of health pri­or­i­ties, but includes HIV, tuber­cu­lo­sis, infant and mater­nal mor­tal­ity. In regards to progress towards MDGs, reduc­tion in NCD bur­den by 10% was nearly the equiv­a­lent to a 40% rise in GDP (or at least five years of eco­nomic growth in devel­op­ing coun­tries). The study high­lighted the fact that NCDs play an impor­tant role in the com­pli­cated rela­tion­ship between poverty and health and as a result, greater empha­sis should not only be placed on address­ing NCDs, but on health sys­tems as a whole.

Our find­ings sug­gest that achieve­ment of fea­si­ble reduc­tions in the impact of these chronic dis­eases on poor house­holds could greatly enhance progress towards exist­ing health MDGs. If not ade­quately addressed, high rates of NCDs in low-income coun­tries may fur­ther impede progress towards the health MDGs.

To bring it closer to home, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion esti­mates that Nige­ria loses about 400 mil­lion dol­lars a year in national income from pre­ma­ture deaths from heart dis­ease, dia­betes, and stroke. I won­der, if that fig­ure includes rev­enue lost from export­ing the health­care of our pres­i­dents to other countries.