COURSTEY  TOI  NOV15

Lifestyle diseases biggest killer even in most backward states

Wide Variations Seen In States’ Disease Profiles

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi:Lifestyle diseases like heart and chronic respiratory diseases now kill more people than communicable ones like tubercolosis or diarrhoea in every state in India, including the most backward. This was revealed in the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative’s Report released on Tuesday. The report notes that while all states have thus made what’s called the ‘epidemiological transition’ there remain wide variations in their disease profiles with some having made that transition as early as 1986, and others as recently as 2010.

The first group to make the transition in 1986 included Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Goa, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The last group to do so, accounting for the highest number of people (588 million), made the transition almost a quarter of a century later in 2010. This group included Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Odisha. India as a country made the transition in 2003.

The report studies the period from 1990 to 2016 and shows that communicable diseases constitute almost twothirds of the disease burden in India from a little over a third in 1990. Despite the transition, which is associated with development, malnutrition remains the single largest risk for health loss in India. It is higher among females and is particularly severe in the backward states.

“While the disease burden due to child and maternal malnutrition has dropped in India substantially since 1990, this is still the single largest risk factor responsible for 15% of total disease burden in India in 2016,” noted the report. The disease burden due to child and maternal malnutrition in India was 12 times higher per person than in China in 2016. Kerala had the lowest burden due to this risk among the Indian states, but even this was 2.7 times higher per person than China