Diseases the World Health Organization

Diseases

The World Health Organization Global Infobase (World Health Organization, 2011). presents a disturbing map with distributions of respiratory illnesses throughout the globe. Focusing on the male population, the distribution reveals that in Asia, mortality rates are highest in China, India, Cambodia and Vietnam. Sub-Saharan Africa also has high rates of mortality related to respiratory diseases among males. Most of Western Europe, Canada, and Australia have among the lowest respiratory illness related disease mortality rates among males (World Health Organization, 2011). Interestingly, when the map is aggregated for the female cohort worldwide, the results are the same.

There is nothing genuinely surprising about this map. Given that there will be two main causes of respiratory illness: smoking and air pollution, the countries with right rates of mortality are the countries most associated with poor air pollution and high smoking rates. China and India are especially interesting in that males are more likely to smoke than females, but the rates of death from respiratory illness are even between the sexes. That would suggest that air pollution and second hand smoke are both linked to the greater number of respiratory illness deaths. It is unsurprising that the most developed and wealthy nations in the world have the lowest rates of respiratory illness. Canada, Australia, and most of Western Europe have the lowest rates of mortality from respiratory illness (World Health Organization, 2011). This is due in part to clean air and reduced emissions policies related to automobiles and factories; and it is also due in part to public awareness campaigns related to smoking cessation. Anti-smoking campaigns are less robust in the countries with high rates of mortality, and regulations on pollution are even less robust in countries with high rates of mortality from respiratory illness.

The countries with the highest mortality rates from respiratory illness are also less likely to have the local and state-level funding for programs that are designed to change smoking behaviors. Therefore, the biggest obstacle to developing programs will be funding. Similarly, developing countries are far less likely to be interested in regulation on industries. Regulating major polluters is a primary objective of any public health campaign designed to target respiratory illnesses in particular. Because primary, secondary, and tertiary elements are complex and related to the regulatory environment, a public health campaign will be difficult to engage. There needs to be significant financial incentives for a public health campaign to work, making it important to work with local and federal officials on the basis of cost savings in worker productivity and health care. If such incentives can be quantified, it may be possible to get the cooperation of both government and the private sector.