Comment on the UN Report on the State of World Health

According to UN report, Cancer, diabetes kill millions, cost trillions globally. Nearly two-thirds of deaths are caused by noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart and lung disease, according to U.N. estimates and preliminary results of a new study.
I agree with the report and advance that chronic non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart and lung diseases are being driven mainly by sedentary lifestyle, poor eating habits and consumption of toxins.

An aspect, which seems to disappear from the radar, is the presence of chronic infections and the resulting damaging inflammation, which is contributing to cancers, diabetes, heart and lung diseases. We should not lose sight of the fact that most of these factors, infections and lifestyles, work in combination

Resistance by microbes to drugs which set out to target them, is making treatment to be palliative rather than curative. Hence, although acute manifestations of some of the communicable infectious diseases are disappearing from our hospital and community settings, a wave of chronicity is being seen in these very settings, which is leaving many people morbid for a very long while.

Taking for, example, HIV/AIDS: People infected with HIV do not only suffer from cancers, heart diseases due to HIV itself but some of the antiretroviral drugs themselves are causing weight gain problems and cardiovascular diseases, in their own right, in patients.

Patients with chronic diseases, who do not suffer and die from cardiovascular accidents, live poorly with co-morbidities, from the combination of unhealthy lifestyle practices that they have lived and chronic infections that they have harbored for a long time.

The simple truth is that some chronic infections are simply too sly and difficult to eliminate with current therapies, which are only helping to send them to sleep for a little while.

Luckily a new line of anti-infective drugs is being developed from peptides, which would mimic or re-enforce our immune system, in the way they work. Resistance might be better overcome this way and chronic infections which are compounding cardiovascular diseases, cancers, lung diseases and diabetes will be better managed. Unsuccessful chemical antibiotic therapy and cancer chemotherapy are converting acute diseases into chronic ones.

Disease prevention is through sane lifestyle, infection prevention and early treatment. The widespread use of dietary supplements may be feeding and fanning these chronic infections since these nutrients are used by infections to grow and this is bad for the patient.

Dr Oliver Verbe Birnso

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