Chronic Disease in China - Progress in Chronic Disease Prevention and Control

Progress in Chronic Disease Prevention and Control

The establishment of Chinese cancer registries began in 1963 in Shanghai, and data from registries led to some of the first programs that addressed chronic diseases in China. For example, mortality from cervical cancer in the Jing'an county of Jiangxi province decreased to 9.6 per 100 000 in 1985 from 42.0 per 100 000 in 1974, at least in part a result of the introduction of the "early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment" of cervical cancer (Kong L, unpublished). Cancer has led the way in chronic disease control initiatives. In 2003, the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, which is responsible for health policy, completed a national cancer control plan on the basis of expert opinions in diverse fields. Some elements of the Program of Cancer Prevention and Control in China (2004–2010) are now being implemented, for example with rapid diagnosis and screening trials for cervical cancer.

Between 1991 and 2000, a community-based intervention trial on management of diabetes and hypertension was done in an urban population of 300,000 in three cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha). The most notable outcomes were that the incidence of stroke decreased by 52% in men and 53% in women, and the mortality rate of stroke fell by 54% overall.

In 1995, the World Bank Loan Health VII: China Disease Prevention Project—health promotion component (1996–2002) began in seven cities: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chengdu, Luoyang, Liuzhou and Weihai, and some regions of Yunnan province. The program covered about 90 million people. To date, among the chronic diseases outcomes reported are an overall reduction of 15% in the prevalence of male adult cigarette smokers, and in Beijing substantial increases in hypertension detection and treatment with a fall in cardiovascular disease death rates of more than 15% in the last year of the project (Wu Z, Director, Beijing Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Vessel Diseases, personal communication).

Based on the experience of this project, the Ministry of Health began establishing demonstration sites for chronic disease prevention and control nationwide in 1997. There are currently 32 community-based sites and the major activities include community diagnosis, community mobilization, development of integrated community interventions (smoking control, healthy diet, physical activity, hypertension prevention, mental health, prevention and control of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory disease), training, and evaluations of interventions.

Read more about this topic:  Chronic Disease In China

Famous quotes containing the words progress in, progress, chronic, disease, prevention and/or control:

    Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.
    Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)

    Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army’s strength is the foot soldiers.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)

    Only then can the chronic inattention
    Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory....
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating. The more topical the play the more it dates.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    ... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
    Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)

    If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)