The INFO Project Blog

Here at the Center for Communication Programs, we are looking at how health communication can alleviate the incidence of chronic disease in the developing world. Senior Program Officers Peter Roberts recently sent around a new study in The Lancet on “The burden and costs of chronic disease in low-income and middle-income countries.” According to the authors, for the estimated death rates for chronic diseases within 15 selected countries in 2005 were 54% higher for men and 86% higher for women than in high income countries. The authors conclude,

If nothing is done to reduce the risk of chronic disease, an estimated US $84 billion of economic production will be lost from heart disease, stroke and diabetes alone in… 23 countries between 2006 and 2015.

The article, the first of a WHO Series of five papers about chronic disease, concludes that “governments have a key role in stimulating the generation of information to reduce the risk of chronic disease and in ensuring access to preventative and treatment services, especially for poor people.”

The Nutrition Transition, which encompasses the demographic shifts (high fertility to low, high mortality to low) and epidemiological shifts (infectious disease to chronic) developing countries experience is a rocky road being studied now in China and elsewhere by Hopkins’s Benjamin Caballero and colleagues. In The Nutrition Paradox–Underweight and Obesity in Developing Countries, Caballero describes one component of the transition, ”the dual burden household”. According to Caballero, in such countries, as many as 60% of families with an underweight family member also have an overweight one. Caballero refers to what is known as Barker’s thrifty genotype hypothesis, writing that

The hypothesis of “fetal origins of disease,”… postulates that undernutrition causes an irreversible differentiation of metabolic systems, which may, in turn, increase the risks of certain chronic diseases in adulthood

The need to tackle malnutrition in infants and children becomes clear, along with the urgent mandate to mitigate the effects of chronic disease.