The outbreak of the Zika virus has become an issue of global concern. And rightly so: such communicable diseases must be aggressively tackled to prevent them becoming a pandemic.
But there is another category of diseases that now represent the world’s leading cause of death, killing 43m people each year, including 16m who die before their 70th birthday. Over 80 per cent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations. The diseases and injuries that cause these deaths also cost the world about $7tn between 2011 and 2025. Yet even though most of them are preventable, they receive 2 per cent of the world’s health funding.
So-called non-communicable diseases, or NCDs, include cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks and stroke, and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma. Some, like many types of cancer, still do not have a cure. Yet, we have learnt that millions of lives can be saved if individuals, governments and health organisations take relatively low-cost steps to help people quit smoking, eat healthier diets and exercise more regularly.