Nation pays a heavy price for rising wealth

BEIJING - China's rising wealth is stretching the country's waistbands, meaning diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases could kill up to 80 million people in the next 10 years, health officials warned yesterday.

Chinese people are typically slim but there are more and more overweight children and adults in the cities, a sign of people switching from healthy local staples to sugar-charged Western food.

Lung cancer is also a major killer and while smoking is banned in some public places and on buses, trains and aeroplanes, people still light up with impunity almost everywhere else.

Attention-grabbing infectious diseases such as bird flu and Sars have been the main public health issues to dominate in China, but the World Health Organisation is warning that more needs to be done to combat the "lifestyle diseases" which already claim more lives every year worldwide than malaria, Aids and tuberculosis.

Last year, 35 million people worldwide died of chronic illnesses - 60 per cent of all deaths. One in five of those were in China.

And the figure is set to rise. Better standards of living have accompanied China's relentless economic advance. But so too has a stark rise in unhealthy living and many big Western killer diseases are becoming alarmingly frequent in China.

The traditional diet is divided along geographical lines into those who eat wheat-based noodles in the north and the rice-eaters of the south, both sources of healthy carbohydrates.

But fast food restaurants are springing up all over the cities as Chinese people opt to spend their cash on oily, fatty foods rather than cooking traditional dishes at home.

Increasing numbers of people are doing sedentary office jobs, city dwellers eat twice as much today as they did in the 1980s and young men and women are smoking from an earlier age.

The new lifestyles mean people have less time to exercise and about 15 per cent of urban youths are overweight. With famines a not-so-distant memory in China, the belief that a fat child is a healthy one is common, leading to more obese children in the schoolyards.

"Lifestyles, eating habits and the healthcare system have changed and so have diseases and death rates. Chronic diseases don't only affect people's health; they undermine the working strength of society," China's Deputy Health Minister Wang Longde told a conference in Beijing, which included health officials from all over the country.

There is little public awareness about diabetes among Chinese people and spending cash in a Western eatery is often seen as a way of showing off new wealth.

The WHO said if nothing was done to combat the rise of chronic illnesses, China faced a major public health problem, which would ultimately impact on economic growth. The death rate from infectious diseases like Aids would rise by about 2 per cent over the next 10 years and the mortality rate from chronic diseases would go up almost a fifth.

Chronic non-communicable diseases account for about 80 per cent of deaths in China and most of these illnesses, which also include strokes, heart disease and asthma, are preventable.

"The bad news is the death rate from chronic diseases in China is higher than in the United States," said WHO chronic diseases and health promotion director Robert Beaglehole.

"The good news is that these losses are preventable," he added, urging the Chinese Government to do more to stop people smoking and trying to rein in salt, sugar and saturated fats in food.

The WHO estimates that fighting illnesses like diabetes and cancer will cost China US$560 billion over the next decade, which is bad news in a country where healthcare provision is poor and underfunded.

- INDEPENDENT