Nigeria, others loses $2.4 trillion annually to diseases – WHO
Doosuur Iwambe, Abuja
The World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed that about 630 million years of healthy life were lost in 2015 due to the diseases afflicting the population across 47 African countries, resulting to a loss of $2.4 trillion from the region’s gross domestic product value annually.
In a statement made available to the Daily Times on Wednesday, the global health body stated that five countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa and the United Republic of Tanzania accounted for almost 50 percent of the total years lost in healthy life (or DALYs) accrued in the WHO African Region.
According to the WHO, non-communicable diseases have overtaken infectious diseases as the largest drain on productivity, accounting for 37 percent of the disease burden. Other culprits for lost healthy years are communicable and parasitic diseases; maternal, neonatal and nutrition-related conditions; and injuries.
The WHO further revealed that about 47 percent, or $796 billion, of this lost productivity value could be avoided in 2030 if the Sustainable Development Goals related to these health conditions are achieved.
“Four years into the implementation of countries’ efforts towards achieving UHC, current average expenditure on health in the Region falls short of this expectation,” the WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, writes in the foreword to A Heavy Burden: The Productivity Cost of Illness in Africa, which was launched during the second WHO Africa Health Forum this week in Cabo Verde.
As a target of Sustainable Development Goal 3, universal health coverage would require countries in the WHO African Region to spend, on average, at least $271 per capita per year on health, or 7.5 percent of the region’s gross domestic product.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has estimated that, attaining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals will require spending ranging from $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion per year until 2030, or up to $37.5 trillion.
Low-income countries will need an additional $671 billion dollars ($76 per capita on average) until 2030 to attain the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
To achieve the health-related SDG targets, countries must invest adequately in the development of resilient national and local health systems to effectively, affordably and efficiently deliver the integrated packages of proven cost-effective interventions contained in relevant programmatic global strategies and plans to target populations in need.
The findings of the WHO study on disease burden suggest that health systems strengthening should focus on rich as well as poor countries and on all ages as well as on the specific disease categories.
