In a commentary in The Lancet, The University of Queensland’s Professor Alan Lopez argues that the World Health Organization (WHO) must allocate more funds to non-communicable diseases and injury prevention.
Writing in the November 1 issue of the UK-based journal, Professor Lopez, Head of UQ’s School of Population Health said that WHO is making a "substantial over-investment in the control of communicable disease at the expense of injury prevention, funds for which are virtually non-existent".
He said that injury caused 12-13 percent of the entire global burden of disease and injury yet received 1 percent of WHO’s regular-budget and extra-budgetary (ie. donated, often by governments) contributions.
Professor Lopez spent 22 years at WHO before becoming Head of UQ's School of Population Health.
He said that "massive increases" in premature death from non-communicable disease risk factors, such as tobacco use, obesity and high blood pressure, were predicted in developing countries over the next few decades.
"Tobacco is predicted to become the leading cause of disease burden worldwide within the next one or two decades, unless current use is dramatically curtailed," he said.
Professor Lopez said that greater investment in research, and the application of research, to control these risk factors and their health factors in poor countries should be given a higher priority by WHO donors than is currently reflected in their "meagre" contributions.
Professor Lopez’s commentary responds to an article in the same issue, WHO’s budgetary allocations and burden of disease: a comparative analysis, by David Stuckler and colleagues.
In the paper, Dr Stuckler and co-authors show that, while donor funding to control injuries and non-communicable disease is increasing, it is doing so very slowly and is still largely disproportionate to need.
Professor Lopez said the challenge for WHO is to make this case more strongly to donors.
He said this may require a "significant shift" in the way WHO did business with greater emphasis on staff competency and qualifications to more efficiently engage chronic disease and injury control communities worldwide and to make better use of advances in prevention science.
"It is not unreasonable to expect that there ought to be consistency in how health and health research priorities are perceived, and funded," he said.
Professor Lopez is one of the world’s leading experts on mortality and burden of disease, having co-authored WHO’s seminal Global Burden of Disease Study, as well as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s The Burden of Disease and Injury in Australia, 2003 and The Burden of Disease and Injury in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 2003.
He also leads, along with the School’s Professor Theo Vos and other colleagues, The Global Burden of Disease 2005 project, a collaboration with the University of Washington, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
More information:
Professor Alan Lopez
a.lopez@sph.uq.edu.au
T: +61 7 336 55280
www.sph.uq.edu.au
Vanessa Mannix Coppard
v.mannixcoppard@sph.uq.edu.au
T: 042 420 7771
