Fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday and although humans are living longer than ever before, one in five deaths last year was linked to poor diet, researchers said yesterday.
More than 1.6 million people in poor countries last year died from diarrhea caused by contaminated water and food, while another 2.4 million succumbed to lung infections that mostly could have been prevented or treated.
Another 2 million mothers and newborns perished due to complications at birth that rudimentary health care could have largely avoided.
AIDS and tuberculosis each claimed more than 1 million lives, while malaria killed more than 700,000 people, according to half-a-dozen studies published jointly in medical journal The Lancet.
However, trend lines have declined over the last decade for these communicable diseases. The same cannot be said for viral hepatitis, which last year killed 1.34 million people — 22 percent more than in 2000, according to the WHO.
“Hepatitis deaths can be avoided,” World Hepatitis Alliance CEO Raquel Peck said, pointing out that no global facility exists to combat the disease and that most sufferers do not even know they have it.
“Globally, only five percent of people living with viral hepatitis are aware of their condition,” she said.
Nearly 55 million people died last year, while 129 million were born, leaving a net gain of 74 million humans on the planet.
Global life expectancy last year was 75.3 years for women and nearly 70 for men. The Japanese averaged 83.9 years, while citizens of the Central African Republic beat the odds if they made it past 50, a discrepancy of more than three decades between highest and lowest lifespans.
Nearly three-quarters of all deaths last year were caused by non-communicable diseases, with heart disease related to restricted blood flow — 9.5 million deaths — the single biggest killer of all. That is an increase of nearly 20 percent in a decade.
Similarly, mortality due to another lifestyle disease, diabetes, went up by more than 30 percent over the same period to 1.4 million.
Cancers — led by lung cancer — are also on the rise, last year accounting for nearly nine million deaths, 17 percent more than in 2006. Tobacco is blamed for 7.1 million of those fatalities.
Startlingly, the study finds that — combining the two extremes of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy eating in richer communities — poor diet is linked to one in five deaths worldwide.
“Among all forms of malnutrition, poor dietary habits — particularly low intake of healthy foods — is the leading risk factor for mortality,” researchers concluded.
The studies, drawing from the input of 2,500 experts, also showed that one in seven people — 1.1 billion — are “living with mental health and substance use disorders.”
Major depression ranked among the top 10 causes of ill health in all but four of the 195 countries and territories covered.
Mental health services are chronically underfunded in most nations, especially in the developing world.
In China, only 6 percent of people coping with common mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety disorders, or with substance abuse and dementia seek out a doctor, earlier research has shown.
Less than 1 percent of national healthcare budgets in China and India is allocated to mental health.
One bright spot was the better-than-expected health performance of several countries — including Ethiopia, the Maldives, Nepal, Niger, Portugal and Peru — that made outsized improvements in relation to national wealth, or GDP.
“These exemplar countries may provide information on successful policies that have helped to accelerate progress on health,” said Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, which centralized and analyzed the millions of data points used in the studies..
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