Who

A few days before my last post and still about the UN High Level Meeting on Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases, The Economist issued a daily chart showing that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for the majority of deaths worldwide. I copy the chart below: [caption id=“attachment_1115” align=“aligncenter” width=“497” caption=“The Economist: non-communicable diseases account for the majority of deaths worldwide”] [/caption] ...

Last week, United Nations gathered in New York, USA, to talk about prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Non-communicable diseases are non-infectious, of long duration and generally progressing slowly. Due to the fact they are not infectious, there is no pathogen to target and there is no transmission medium to fight. Due to their long duration and slow progression, one usually notices NCDs when it’s too late and eradicating NCDs is less spectacular than other (not less important) infectious diseases. However WHO measured that NCDs represents more than 60% of all deaths in the world. For the occasion, WHO released an introductory video that summarize the issue. ...

From Delicious, I saw that Yahoo had an article about the top 5 killers of men. I thought it would be nice to see from where they get there data. First, I have to mention that the article is really about American men, nothing else (not about mankind, not about men around the world, not about women, children, etc.). The article is related to the US National Men’s Health Week (the US National Women’s Health Week was in May 8-14, 2011). Although the article is giving advices, there are no sources of information. ...

TB stands for tuberculosis. It’s an infectious bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs. It is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the throat and lungs of people with the active respiratory disease. Like all other World Days regarding infectious diseases, it is meant to raise awareness about its global epidemiological aspects and the efforts to eliminate it. For tuberculosis, March 24th was chosen because Robert Koch first described Mycobacterium tuberculosis on March 24th, 1882. He then received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this in 1905. ...

It doesn’t seem jolly but last Friday, it was the World Cancer Day. About this, the WHO set up a nice website about cancer control. Following my previous post on Jamie Oliver and the top 15 causes of death in the USA, I started to collect similar data from other countries. Linking this to cancers, the annual statistics on cancers in Belgium can be found on the Belgian Cancer Registry. The latest numbers are however from 2006. Here are the top 15 cancers in Belgium in 2006 (all sexes and regions mixed): ...