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Shobha Shukla, Citizen News Service - CNS [ Podcast ] [ Video ] As fertility rates decline and life expectancy increases, the number of senior citizens is growing globally. Among the 7.3 billion people worldwide in 2015, an estimated 617.1 million, were aged 65 years or more. The Asia Pacific region is ageing rapidly and South-East Asia’s elderly numbers are growing fast at around 5% a year - between now and 2030 there will be nearly 20 million more people aged 60 and above in the region. Listen or download this audio podcast   Watch this video interview Turning its focus upon the the ageing populations in ASEAN countries, the European Union (EU) awarded a grant to the HelpAge East Asia Pacific Regional Office ( HelpAge EAPRO ) to implement a 4 year project (February 2013-January 2017) with key partners for "Strengthening the CSO Network on Ageing as a Development Partner in Southeast Asia (AMCo)". This project prioritised strategic activities in 6 ASEAN countries of Cambod...

Alice Sagwidza-Tembe, CNS Correspondent, Swaziland Coming back from the 47th Union World Conference on Lung Health held in Liverpool in October 2016, it is time to reflect upon the myriad advancements and debates to better the quality of care for people with TB—shortening the treatment schedule for multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB), addressing the otherwise forgotten groups like adolescents, celebrities opening up about having lived with TB, and plenty more on fresh approaches to end the epidemic. An interesting, but not so new aspect crept into every discussion—the socio-economic issues that dampen efforts to stop TB and that begged the question: Are national TB programmes responsible for eradicating poverty to ensure effectiveness of the TB treatment therapy? Speaking with Dr Samson Haumba , the Country Director at the University Research Company in Swaziland, he expressed, “The socio-economic needs of the patient are critical to the intervention. However, the National TB programme b...

Catherine Mwauyakufa, CNS Correspondent, Zimbabwe To say that more poor people succumb to non communicable diseases (NCDs) as compared to the rich is not an understatement. One would wonder, why this co-relation between poverty and NCDs— if these diseases are non communicable how do they end up killing more poor people? Poverty stricken communities have little or limited recourse to healthcare, and hence access to medical screening is constrained and at times not available to them. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), cancers, respiratory diseases and diabetes are the four main NCDs that account for 82% of all NCD deaths. As far as CVDs (group of disorders of the heart and blood vessels) are concerned, early detection is crucial in managing them. Another important factor is that people coming from families with a history of CVD have to be monitored and if found in need get early treatment. Now poverty plays a negative role as poor people fail to get health monitoring as required. An interes...

Alice Tembe, CNS Correspondent, Swaziland Eleanor Frame …So said Eleanor Frame, an 18 year old teenager from UK, who survived TB. Eleanor shared her story at the 47th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Liverpool. She said that she had no idea about what TB was, and nether did her classmates, until she herself was diagnosed with it at the age of 14. And that lack of knowledge bred fear in her and discrimination from her friends who isolated her and also resulted in the delays in her diagnosis by her medical doctor. “It was dismissed as just a chuckle, a bad chest infection, not once but twice by my doctor, until my mother insisted on the test”, she said. “I sent my teacher an email to tell her that I was sick with TB and will not be in school for a while. She posted it on the school’s year board, and in a split second my whole class knew about my condition.” While speaking with CNS (Citizen News Service), Eleanor recalled vividly that on the day she was diagnosed with TB,...

Prakash Tyagi, CNS Correspondent, India Help Age International Asia Pacific Regional Office , United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Government of Vietnam, Asian Forum of Parliamentarians for Population and Development (AFPPD) and World Health Organization (WHO) along with a number of other organizations and network partners organized a regional conference on ageing and associated aspects. Held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in the first week of September 2016, the conference gathered over 300 academicians, experts, physicians, practitioners and policy makers from over 36 countries. “Ageing is a serious development challenge for many countries, including Vietnam “quoted the Deputy Prime Minister of Vietnam inaugurating the conference. The conference was themed as Economic Implications of Ageing— an aspect of ageing which is almost always discussed in negative terms with loss of productivity and cost burdens. “Time has come to turn the tides around to look at the contributions aged populations m...

Francis Okoye, CNS Correspondent, Nigeria In a webinar organised for the media by Citizen News Service, in the lead up to World Heart Day 2016, health experts spoke on cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). They discussed ways and means to protect oneself from them, as they are the world’s leading cause of death, killing 17.5 million people every year. The experts included Rachael Shaw , project manager World Heart Federation, Prof Dr Rishi Sethi, Department of Cardiology, King George’s Medical University KGMU, and Alice Granger Gasser , programme development manager, World Heart Federation. Ashok Ramsarup, former senior programme  producer at South African  Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) moderated the programme. It has been a year since our governments committed to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 2030, one of which is to reduce mortality from non communicable diseases (NCDs) by 1/3 by 2030. CVD is one of the 4 main NCDs—the other 3 being diabetes, cancer and chron...

Urvashi Prasad, CNS Correspondent, India According to the World Malaria Report 2015, malaria cases and deaths have declined over the last 15 years. However, the disease still claims 400,000 lives every year, primarily in Africa. Malaria control and elimination poses several challenges that need to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. Firstly, climate change has contributed to a spike in the number of malaria cases in several regions of the world that were previously not as badly affected. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) teams have observed an increase in the number of malaria cases during the last few years. While several factors might be responsible for this, an increase in temperatures and rainfall caused by the El Niño has played an important role. Secondly, mosquitoes are becoming resistant to pyrethroids which is one of the most common insecticides used to tre...

Chhatra Karki, CNS Correspondent, Nepal Malaria is still a major health problem in Nepal where more than 80% people are at risk, with 4% of them being at high risk. According to the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division (EDCD) of Health Ministry of Nepal, 1 million people (out of Nepal’s current population of 29,000,000) live in malaria high-risk areas with a reported incidence of more than 1 case per 1000 population per year. Dr. Dirgha Singh Bam , Senior Physician and former health secretary of Nepal government says, "Pregnant women and children under five years of age are especially at high risk and special preventive measures should be taken for them." Nepal has made remarkable progress towards controlling malaria spread, and malaria cases declined by 84% over the past decade. But, it has been a challenge for the National Malaria Control Programme to provide sufficient anti-malaria services such as early diagnosis and treatment, indoor residual spraying, distribution...

Dr Richa Sharma, CNS Correspondent, India Kusum (name changed) shudders at the mere mention of malaria. Last year she was diagnosed with malaria and suffered from weakness, fever, nausea and constant body ache for days. The news of two malaria deaths in the National Capital Region of Delhi is enough to transport her back to the nightmare of enduring it all. Malaria, a life threatening disease, is transferred through the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito, which releases Plasmodium parasite into the bloodstream. After an incubation period of 10-15 days, symptoms like fever, headache, chills, and vomiting occur in the infected individual. Multi organ involvement in adults and severe anaemia, respiratory distress or cerebral malaria in children often occur in later stages. The recent unprecedented victory of Sri Lanka’s long standing battle against malaria serves as a wake-up call to the other countries in the South East Asia region and puts malaria elimination back in the spotlight...

Aarti Dhar, CNS Correspondent, India [First published in theindiasaga.com] India’s private sector is treating an enormous number of patients for TB, almost double the number than has been previously recognized and requires re-doubled efforts to address this burden and strengthen surveillance, a latest Lancet report has said. TB burden estimates in India and worldwide require revision, the report added. There were 17·793 million patient-months of anti TB treatment in the private sector in 2014, which was twice as many as in the public sector. If 40–60% of private-sector TB diagnoses are correct, and if private-sector TB treatment lasts on an average 2–6 months, this implies that 1.19—5.34 million TB cases were treated in the private sector  alone in 2014. The midpoint of these ranges yields an estimate of 2·2 million cases— two to three times higher than currently assumed, according to the study "The number of privately treated tuberculosis cases in India: An estimation from dru...