WORLD HEALTH DAY-2012(APRIL-7)

WORLD HEALTH DAY-2012(APRIL-7)

Every year, World Health Day is celebrated on 7 April to mark the anniversary of the founding of W.H.O in 1948. Each year a theme is selected for World Health Day that highlights a priority area of concern for WHO. World Health Day is a global campaign, inviting everyone – from global leaders to the public in all countries – to focus on a single health challenge with global impact. Focusing on new and emerging health issues, World Health Day provides an opportunity to start collective action to protect people's health and well-being.

The topic of World Health Day in 2012 is Ageing and health with the theme "Good health adds life to years". The focus is how good health throughout life can help older men and women lead full and productive lives and be a resource for their families and communities. Ageing concerns each and every one of us – whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor – no matter where we live. Over the past century, humanity has been adding years to life. This century, the world will soon have more older people than children World Health Day 2012 focuses on how good health can add life to years, enabling older men and women to not only live longer, but also to extend their active involvement in all levels of society. The experience of ageing in the 21st century will be very different from that in the last century. We need to reinvent ageing. On World Health Day, WHO invites you to think about the sort of society we want to create and consider the policies and action we need to put in place to anticipate and respond to population ageing, with health at the core. One of the biggest social transformations is population aging. Soon, the world will have older people than children and more people of very old age than ever before. The World Health Organization is focusing on aging and health for World Health Day on April 7.

 The world will have more people who live to see their 80s or 90s than ever before. The number of people aged 80 years or older, for example, will have almost quadrupled to 395 million between 2000 and 2050. There is no historical precedent for a majority of middle-aged and older adults having living parents, as is already the case today. More children will know their grandparents and even their great-grandparents, especially their great-grandmothers. On average, women live six to eight years longer than men. The past century has seen remarkable improvements in life expectancy. In 1910, the life expectancy for a Chilean female was 33 years; today, it is 82 years. This represents a remarkable gain of almost 50 years of life in one century, and is largely due to improvements in public health. Soon, the world will have more older people than children. Within the next five years, for the first time in human history, the number of adults aged 65 and over will outnumber children under the age of 5. By 2050, these older adults will outnumber children under the age of 14. The world population is rapidly aging. Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world's population over 60 years will double from about 11 percent to 22 percent. The absolute number of people aged 60 years and over is expected to increase from 605 million to 2 billion over the same period.

National policies to promote healthy ageing exist in Bangladesh, DPR (North) Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. But there is an urgent need to focus attention on issues such as economic effects of ageing on the health care system, ways of ensuring independence in old age, quality of life and health problems of elderly females and very old persons.

Sedentary lifestyle and habits such as  smoking, poor diet have influenced the health outcomes in old age. The WHO expresses concern over changing social patterns where nuclear families are replacing joint families and the old and the infirm are often left at home."These changing patterns of society are now affecting the care of the old and very old persons at home. Healthy ageing requires a significant paradigm shift in providing care to the elderly," the WHO said. "Building an age-friendly society needs actions from sectors other than health such as education, employment, labour, finance, social security, transportation, justice, housing and rural-urban development. On World Health Day, WHO is urging policy-makers and partners to pay urgent attention to ageing and health," the WHO concluded.

                            Prof. John Kurakar