Non-communicable diseases killing more people than ever before: UN health agency

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10 December 2020

Non-communicable diseases killing more people than ever before: UN health agency

The 2019 Global Health Estimates, released on Wednesday, “clearly highlight” the need for increased attention on preventing and treating cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, as well as tackling injuries, according to WHO.

“These new estimates are another reminder that we need to rapidly step up prevention, diagnosis and treatment of non-communicable diseases,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

“They highlight the urgency of drastically improving primary health care equitably and holistically.”

Mr. Tedros also underlined the importance of strong primary health care for combatting non-communicable diseases as well as the coronavirus pandemic. People living with pre-existing health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes and respiratory conditions, are at higher risk of complications and death due to COVID-19.

The study covers the years 2000 to 2019, prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The next update to the estimates will include an assessment of the direct and indirect impact of the pandemic on mortality and morbidity.

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Heart disease ‘number 1 killer’

According to WHO, heart disease has remained the leading cause of death at the global level for the last 20 years, but it is now killing more people than ever before, representing 16 per cent of total deaths from all causes.

The number of deaths from heart disease increased over fourfold, from 2 million since 2000, to nearly 9 million in 2019.

Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are now among the top 10 causes of death worldwide, and deaths from diabetes increased by 70 per cent globally between 2000 and 2019.

The findings also pointed to a global decline in deaths from communicable diseases, though they remain major challenge in low- and middle-income countries. Deaths from tuberculosis, for instance, reduced by about 30 per cent.

Disability on the rise

The Global Health Estimates also found that life-spans have increased over the years, with a global average of more than 73 years (in 2019) compared to nearly 67 (in 2000). But on average, only 5 of those additional years were lived in good health.

“Disability is on the rise,” WHO said, explaining that to a large extent, the diseases and health conditions causing the most deaths are also responsible for most number of healthy life-years lost.

“Injuries are another major cause of disability and death,” the UN agency added, noting that there has been a “significant rise” in road traffic injuries since 2000, with the African region worst affected.

Rise in drug use-related deaths

In the Americas, drug use emerged as a major factor in both disability and death: there was a nearly threefold increase in deaths from drug use disorders in the Americas between 2000 and 2019.

The region is also the only one for which drug use disorder is a top 10 contributor to healthy life-years lost due to premature deaths and disability.

COMMENT | Reclaiming deprived right to religion due to Covid-19

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Newsdesk

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10 December 2020

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COMMENT | Reclaiming deprived right to religion due to Covid-19

COMMENT | The right to practice and profess religion certainly has been one of the casualties caused by the Covid-19. The threat of the pandemic, which has been weathered globally for the past 12 months, has tremendously affected the universally accepted tenet of freedom of religion.

Religion, in any name and sect all over the world, has restricted its religious practices and rituals. The restrictions, although only relegated public religious practices to personal spaces, have in many ways affected the right to religion as a whole.

There is every reason why the right to religion is believed to have been undermined by the threat of Covid-19. Religious practices and rituals around the world directly contravened with the public health advice advocated in stopping the transmission of the virus.

They include public congregations in a large crowd, hand-based greetings as well as touching and kissing objects considered sacred. These practices signify the…

African leaders nix EU-AU summit as tensions simmer

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Newsdesk

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10 December 2020

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African leaders nix EU-AU summit as tensions simmer

Simmering institutional tensions between the EU and the African Union resulted in the last-minute cancellation of a ‘mini-summit’ between European Union and African leaders planned for Wednesday (9 December).

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the current chair of the AU, called off the summit on Tuesday, and insiders to the talks say that the cancellation of the videoconference was the result of disagreements over the agenda and the format of the meeting.

No African heads of state aside from Ramaphosa were able to attend the summit. Neither was, from the EU side, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

An EU official blamed “agenda issues” for the cancellation.

The meeting had been billed by the EU as “an opportunity to build further momentum towards the upcoming summit and discuss the partnership between Europe and Africa.”

However, there is frustration among African officials that the EU seems intent on driving the agenda with little consultation.

The mini-summit had been announced in October by EU Council President Charles Michel, with minimum consultation with African leaders, shortly after plans for an EU-AU summit scheduled for October were abandoned because of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and disagreements over the agenda.

The European Commission’s strategy paper published in March promised to “build a more prosperous, more peaceful and more sustainable future for all”, around five proposed partnerships on energy, digitalisation, inward investment, peace and migration. The African Union is yet to publish its own position paper on its hopes from the partnership agenda.

“The EU needs to rethink its approach to the consultation process. The cancellation reflects the need to take the African side seriously,” a senior official involved in the talks told EURACTIV.

Having started this year with hopes of agreeing a ‘strategic partnership’ between the EU and Africa by the end 2020, little progress has been made, in part because the priorities of both continents have been focused on combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

The cancellation was greeted with dismay by development NGOs.

“The AU’s last-minute cancellation of today’s EU-AU leaders meeting sends a worrying signal of their lack of confidence in the EU’s commitment to a stronger partnership,” said Brandon Locke, policy and advocacy manager at The ONE Campaign.

“The EU’s partnership with Africa needs to move past a “donor-recipient” relationship to an alliance on equal footing, where Europe recognizes Africa’s interests and vision for its own future,” added Locke, who said the EU “needs to deliver with concrete commitments to rebalance the economic partnership between the two continents”.

Negotiators from the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific community signed off on a 20-year partnership deal to succeed the Cotonou Agreement last Thursday night (3 December) after nearly three years of difficult talks.

Although the new pact includes a new regional protocol between the EU and sub-Saharan Africa, and a new tougher text on migrant re-admission and return, it left trade relations unchanged and based on the controversial economic partnership agreements, widely criticised for perpetuating unbalanced trade relations between the EU and African countries.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

Markets in Asia-Pacific Trade Lower Amid Uncertainty Over UK-EU Trade Deal and US Relief Bill

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Newsdesk

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10 December 2020

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Markets in Asia-Pacific Trade Lower Amid Uncertainty Over UK-EU Trade Deal and US Relief Bill

Asia-Pacific markets reacted negatively to the unpromising Brexit trade deal perspective as well as to the indeterminate second US coronavirus relief bill in Thursday morning trade, according to CNBC News.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Topix were lower 0.39 percent and 0.17 percent respectively after the market opened. South Korea’s Kospi index fell 1.11 percent. Australian benchmark ASX 200 dropped 0.56 percent while its sections all finished in the red. The energy subindex was down 1.05 percent, as oil prices have declined.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, stocks closed negatively on Wednesday evening, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq leading losses with a nearly 2 percent drop. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Wall Street’s broadest stocks gauge, finished down 0.4 percent to close at 30,069, after a record high at 30,320. The S&P 500, a barometer for the top 500 US stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, slid 0.8 percent to finish at 3,673, after setting an all-time high of 3,712 earlier.

On Wednesday, British PM Boris Johnson held a further round of negotiations with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, where both of them agreed that a firm decision should be made by Sunday about the future of the talks. At the moment, trade with Northern Ireland and the level of access to British fishing grounds given to EU vessels are the most crucial issues in talks. The UK and the European Union are supposed to come to an agreement before the Brexit transition period expires on 31 December, as Boris Johnson refused to prolong it last year.

On Capitol Hill, debates over the second financial aid continue as the coronavirus-related crisis is striking the country. Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked over key provisions of the recently introduced $908 billion relief bill. The package has to be approved by 11 December, but Congress has requested another week to negotiate the bill, with a new deadline set for 18 December.

Grants totaling more than $43 million will help cultural institutions nationwide explore religion

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RNS Press Release Distribution Service

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10 December 2020

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INDIANAPOLIS – Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded 18 grants to museums and other cultural institutions across the United States to develop exhibitions and education programs that fairly and accurately portray the role of religion in the U.S. and around the world.

Grants totaling more than $43 million will support a range of organizations, from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to Colonial Williamsburg; from the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. These grants were awarded as part of the Endowment’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

“Museums and other cultural institutions are trusted organizations and play an important role in teaching the American public about the world around them,” said Christopher Coble, the Endowment’s vice president for religion. “These organizations will use the grants to help visitors understand and appreciate the significant impact religion has had and continues to have on society in the United States and around the globe. Our hope is that these efforts will promote greater knowledge about and respect for people of diverse religious traditions.”

With one exception, the grants range in amount from $500,000 to $2.5 million. The organizations will use grant funds to develop projects that align with their missions and are appropriate for their constituencies. Many will draw on their extensive collections to mount temporary or permanent exhibitions featuring religious themes. Some will develop exhibitions focused on particular religious traditions or religion in specific historical periods. Others will examine religious themes and practices or explore the diversity of religious life in specific geographic regions. Nearly half of the grants will provide funds for endowments to help organizations create permanent staff positions or ongoing programs focused on religion. Many organizations will use a portion of their grants to enhance digital technologies to allow them to reach audiences virtually.

Among the organizations funded are:
• The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art (Freer Gallery of Art and Artur M. Sackler Gallery), located in Washington, D.C., which will develop a series of exhibitions that help visitors understand the diversity of pre-modern and contemporary Muslim, Buddhist, Zen and Hindu traditions.
• The National World War I Museum and Memorial, located in Kansas City, which will establish an endowed curator position on faith and religion, strengthen public programming on religion in a time of war and enhance gallery and virtual exhibitions.
• The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which will develop an exhibition that explores universal experiences of mortality alongside distinctive ways that religious beliefs and practices help communities respond to death.
• The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, which will establish an endowment to make religion a central component of the museum’s work, incorporate religion into the re-installation of its Native American Gallery, and help with the development and mounting of an exhibition focused on religion and the American West.

A complete list of grants can be found here.

Lilly Endowment launched the Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative in 2019 when it awarded planning grants totaling nearly $2 million to organizations to help them explore how programming in religion could further their institutional missions. Many organizations used the planning period to examine how religious themes were already present in their collections and design projects that would enhance and complement their current activities. Since the planning activities occurred during COVID-19, many of the organizations experimented with and ultimately proposed increasing their digital capacities to interpret religion and reach additional audiences.

The Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative builds directly on insights and experiences from previous grants to museums and cultural organizations to mount exhibitions that lift up and explore religious themes. Past grant recipients include the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, and the International African American Museum located in Charleston, S.C.

Among the current grant recipients, the Smithsonian Institution is receiving a nearly $8 million grant to enable the National Museum of American History to establish its Center for the Public Understanding of Religion in American History and create a dedicated gallery featuring the impact of religion on American history. Through the Center, the Smithsonian also will establish a network for museums and other cultural institutions to learn from and with each other about their work in religion.

Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly, Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. Although the gifts of stock remain a financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion and maintains a special commitment to its founders’ hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana. The Endowment also funds significant programs throughout the United States, especially in the field of religion. While the primary aim of its grantmaking in religion focuses on strengthening the leadership and vitality of Christian congregations in the United States, the Endowment also seeks to foster public understanding about religion and lift up in fair, accurate and balanced ways the contributions that people of all faiths and diverse religious communities make to our greater civic well-being.

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Contact

Judith Cebula
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(317) 916-7327

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Religion News Service or Religion News Foundation.

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