World Health Assembly in Geneva this week

This week, the most important Global Health event is taking place in Geneva, the World Health Assembly.

The World Health Assembly is the decision-making body of WHO. It is attended by delegations from all WHO Member States and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board. It also bring together delegates from around the world to discuss issues spanning the breath of global health.

One of the agenda items covered today is follow-up to the high-level meetings of the United Nations General Assembly on health-related issues, on prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCD’s).

Together with a number of other international scientific societies active in global health, the International Society of Endocrinology joined an alliance to issue a formal statement on the commitments made in the Political Declaration on NCDs 2018, to ensure that all diseases areas are taken into consideration.

Today’s discourse on NCD’s focuses on 5 main disease group: these are cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes and now also mental health.

The ISE acknowledges the focus on diabetes which represents 1.6 million deaths worldwide and with an alarming rise in developing nations. Yet, 55% of the global NCD burden arises from other NCDs, for which the current public health response doesn’t meet the patient’s needs. They include  many endocrine disorders but also renal, neurological, haematological, gastroenterological, hepatic, muscolosketal, skin and oral diseases and genetic disorders.

Multi-morbidities, shared disease clusters & social determinants are creating big challenges to patient access to care & health systems still configured to treat individual diseases.

Our common alliance call is to:

• Address the large number of NCDs which are not currently included in their plans
• Strive for health systems that deliver people-centered, integrated, multisectoral & comprehensive services aimed at prevention, early detection & treatment of all NCDs
  and risk factors, leaving no disease behind Secure sustained human & financial resources to ensure a comprehensive NCD response
• Recognize importance of all NCDs by ensuring the meaningful involvement of the list of co-signatories to this statement to all consultation meetings regarding NCDs
• Ensure that all NCDs are included in the work done to prepare Member States for the 2019 HLM on UHC

For more information on the WHA, see: https://www.who.int/en/home/