Global health is the populations’ health within a global context. Besides, it has often been defined as the practice and research study area that emphasizes on achieving equity and improving health for all individuals in the world. On the other hand, global health issue refers to the Global Health’s emerging issues, including death rates from noncommunicable causes, such as stroke, heart disease, as well as injuries. Therefore, this report provides an explicit discussion concerning a particular global health issue as well as a comparison of how it manifests in different regions.
The Specific Global Health Issue
The specific global health issue is the prevalence of heart disease, which has been regarded as an urgent threat to the health of the entire world, and it is predicted that it would be the leading cause of deaths by the year 2020. In the United States alone, about 610,000 individuals die as a result of heart disease yearly and is thus the leading death cause for both women and men in this Country ( Mendis, Davis & Norrving, 2015). For instance, coronary heart disease (CHD) is the standard type of heart disease affecting people in the United States.
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In Africa, particularly in Cameroon, a significant number of deaths occur as a result of coronary heart disease. For instance, it is responsible for about 50% of all deaths, which is as a result of the epidemiological transitions this African Country is going through ( Prince, Wu, Guo, Robledo, O'Donnell, Sullivan & Yusuf, 2015). On the other hand, CHD is also prevalence in Asia and thus causing a substantial number of deaths annually. For instance, the ischemic heart disease in Japan is regarded as the cause of about 20% of deaths being experienced in the Country annually.
Risk Factors and Statistics
The populations that are affected most by the heart disease are mainly those that are at high risks of contracting or are suffering from various risk factors, including diabetes, hypertension, or even an already established diseased. López, Tan and Soriano (2016) posit that significant heart disease risk factors are such as unhealthy diet, tobacco use, physical inactivity, as well as harmful utilization of alcohol.
Additionally, it seems that older people are a target population of CHD as compared to other younger communities. It is because the risk of contracting heart disease increases with the increase in age. For instance, by the age of 55 years, the risk of contracting this global health disease doubles to almost 2 out of every 100 men ( Barquera, Pedroza, Medina, Hernández, Bibbins, Lozano & Moran, 2015). Besides, the threat continues to increase for this population until by the time of 85 years; nearly 7.4 out of 100 men have contracted CHD. However, it seems that CHD does not affect the younger populations of age 45 and below since they are still at their youthful age and by the fact that most of them are still physically fit.
Three Current Initiatives to Manage this Issue and the Progress Made in Five Years
“Global Hearts” is an example of the first ongoing initiative launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 and has made significant progress in thwarting the CHD threat, including strokes and heart attacks ( Vartiainen, Laatikainen, Peltonen & Puska, 2016). Besides, this initiative is part of a heightened effort of scaling up both the control and prevention of cardiovascular heart disease, particularly within the developing countries, and has eventually helped in reducing the number of deaths for the past five years.
“Million Hearts 2022” is the second essential public-private initiative that for the past five years have worked towards preventing 1 million heart diseases through a continual implementation of ABCS and the establishment of scalable ways to populations. As a result, this has allowed the healthcare sector in executing the evidence-based prevention of CHD.
The third initiative current program is the “Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Women Across the Nation (WISEWOMAN)” ( Savarese & Lund, 2017). It has assisted the under-insured and uninsured low-income women in understanding and reducing heart disease risk through the provision of lifestyle programs and health counseling, which has improved the general health outcome for the past five years.
Three of my Suggestions to Continue Progress in Managing this Global Health Issue
From a personal perspective, my first suggestion is that the governments should take the primary responsibility of funding resources that could help in managing and preventing heart diseases. For instance, it is the responsibility of the government to fund its hospitals by providing crucial tools for measuring the effectiveness of this particular management program.
My second suggestion is that another management remedy should lie with an individual suffering from any heart disease. For instance, Mendis, Davis and Norrving (2015) observe that people with coronary heart diseases should consider changing their behavioral lifestyles, such as quitting the tendency of smoking or even harmful consumption of alcohol. As a result, this would significantly assist in reducing the prevalence of heart diseases globally as a result of individual efforts taken by patients with CHD.
My third suggestion is that the management approach should rely on hospitals and clinicians. They should consider educating their patients on various ways they can utilize to manage and prevent heart diseases ( Prince, Wu, Guo, Robledo, O'Donnell, Sullivan & Yusuf, 2015) . Besides, it would be necessary for hospitals to provide patients with regular follow-up visits to ascertain their health conditions, particularly after delivering medication.
Conclusion
In summary, heart disease, particularly the cardiovascular heart disease is a serious global health issue concern. Besides, it accounts for 50% of deaths in almost all countries across the globe, including Cameroon in Africa, Japan in Asia, as well as the United States. Therefore, it is imperative to always consider the associated risks factors with particular health issues in order to have significant initiatives that can be used to control and manage the disease at a global level.
References
Barquera, S., Pedroza-Tobías, A., Medina, C., Hernández-Barrera, L., Bibbins-Domingo, K., Lozano, R., & Moran, A. E. (2015). Global overview of the epidemiology of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Archives of medical research , 46 (5), 328-338.
López ‐ Campos, J. L., Tan, W., & Soriano, J. B. (2016). Global burden of COPD. Respirology , 21 (1), 14-23.
Mendis, S., Davis, S., & Norrving, B. (2015). Organizational update: the world health organization global status report on noncommunicable diseases 2014; one more landmark step in the combat against stroke and vascular disease. Stroke , 46 (5), e121-e122.
Prince, M. J., Wu, F., Guo, Y., Robledo, L. M. G., O'Donnell, M., Sullivan, R., & Yusuf, S. (2015). The burden of disease in older people and implications for health policy and practice. The Lancet , 385 (9967), 549-562.
Savarese, G., & Lund, L. H. (2017). Global public health burden of heart failure. Cardiac failure review , 3 (1), 7.
Vartiainen, E., Laatikainen, T., Peltonen, M., & Puska, P. (2016). Predicting coronary heart disease and stroke: The FINRISK Calculator. Global heart , 11 (2), 213-216.
