“Palau and the rest of the Micronesian region are experiencing an epidemic called lifestyle-related diseases, yet there is no sense of emergency towards it,” said the minister.
In Palau, the most common causes of death are related to non-communicable or lifestyle-related diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, gout, asthma, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. “The region has some of the highest rate for lifestyle diseases in the world,” the minister added.
PIHOA covers Palau, Guam, CNMI, FSM, Marshall Island and American Samoa. “We just finished discussions; and PIHOA is going to declare some kind of emergency lifestyle disease,” the minister shared. “We’re going to ask the regional partners, donors and agencies to actually look at the model that we’re using for Pandemic Flu and see how we can apply that to respond to the lifestyle disease epidemic happening in the region.”
The Minister explained that unlike with the outbreak of H1N1 where there was a pressure to do something about it, lifestyle diseases are not seem to be taken seriously. “Yet people are dying everyday from lifestyle diseases. Why is that? We need to find out why the community
is not responding to it. We are still getting fat, eating salty food.
It’s about time we changed that mentality. This is an emergency.”
The Minister said that Palau needs to have an emergency type of process that deals with this epidemic. “We know it is an epidemic. We have to declare an epidemic of lifestyle related diseases.”
In late March, PIHOA will have a meeting in American Samoa to talk about the issue of lifestyle diseases as well as the effects of climate change and emergency preparedness.
PIHOA will come up with a resolution from the health minister and secretaries of the region. The minister said he wants the issue to become a national priority the same way as the pandemic H1N1 flu.
