This was the conclusion of a recent major regional gathering in Fiji of specialists and health administrators working in the Pacific.
One delegate said the spread of noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs, which claim 75 percent of lives in the Pacific, wasan emergency.
Dave Clarke of public policy and regulatory specialists, Allen & Clarke, told the Pacific Noncommunicable Disease Forum 2009 that “we need to regard NCDs as a worse public health emergency than cyclones and pandemics.”
“Cyclones go away but NCDs stick around,” he said.
NCD problems in the Pacific region were complex, he said. “They are a burden, they are enduring and they are the biggest threats to well-being in this region.”
Clarke said policy and legislation should encourage us to move away from eating such things as mutton flaps, but importers were also members of our community and we should approach them.
Answering questions after his presentation “Policy and legislation development in the fight against NCDs,” Clarke said there were examples of successful outcomes from these approaches.
He said it was important to work out the particular characteristics of a country and to try and provide simple legislation that people could understand and easily implement. Policy and legislation could thus help people make healthy choices.
He was working on a toolkit for policy and legislation formulation. It was 90 percent complete and would be released soon for countries’ practical action.
Clarke stressed the importance of four stages in the policy generation process: assessment, planning, action and review.
The forum was organized by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and the World Health Organization as part of a joint approach to tackling NCDs with Pacific Island countries and territories and development assistance partners.
