Diabetes, High-blood pressure, and heart disease are just some of the non-communicable diseases caused by unhealthy dietary and lifestyle behaviour. They're also some of the leading causes of death worldwide and in the Caribbean, these diseases are a major threat to health, development, and even economic stability.
It's all part and parcel of the reasoning for this week's NCD surveillance workshop, scheduled for today and tomorrow at the Biltmore.
And this morning as the workshop opened up representative Dr Edwin Bolastig gave us some worrying statistics about NCDs and praised Belize for the role it's now taking on this global fight.
Dr. Edwin Bolastig, Health Systems and Services Advisor
"More than 40 million people die annually from NCD representing 74% of global deaths. This includes more than 50 million people who died too young between the ages of 30 and 70. In the Americas, NCD's are responsible for more than 1 million or 34% of premature deaths and in the Caribbean 44%. Of all premature deaths and Belize NCD's account for 65% of deaths with 16% probability of premature mortality from NCD's according to the 2022 NCD progress monitoring."
"Today Belize demonstrates it's leadership in strengthening Belize's capacity to conduct surveillance on NCD's and risk factors by assessing and building up on key sources of information to better monitor policies and programs and respond to global and regional commitments."
Dr. Melissa Diaz, Director, Public Health & Wellness
"In 2020 an estimated 2/3 of the global burden of disease has been caused by chronic NCD's directly associated with diet. In Belize according to the Ministry of Health and Wellness's epidemiology unit the leading causes of death for the year 2021 and this is in descending order were COVID-19, diseases of the heart, malignant neoplasms, diabetes, and fifth is assault and homicides."
"Surveillance is a compulsory part of any health system, and stretching surveillance across the health sector will help to detect and manage cases and situations early and of course, surveillance goes hand in hand with research and this is also an area that we are very much trying to do a lot more in at Ministry of health and wellness."
"We aim to assess capacity at the national level on NCD's and risk factor surveillance by identifying processes and strategies that we can do to improve."
The goal of this week's workshop is to review national, regional, and global surveillance as well as to develop work plans to build on Belize's national surveillance system.
