Historic Drive to UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs Goes into High Gear with Moscow Meetings

Posted on: April 27th, 2011 by Arogya World

This week there is the much-awaited Russian Ministerial Meeting – The First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Non-Communicable Disease Control – organized by the WHO and the Russian Ministry of Health, on April 28 and 29 in Moscow. Widely recognized and anticipated as an important precursor to the UN High-Level Meeting, this meeting – really, the meeting in advance of the UN NCD Summit – is bringing together 100 Ministers of Health and 150 government delegations from around the world to deliberate on the NCD issues that the UN High Level Meeting will also consider in September.

The US delegation to Moscow is led by Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon is expected to participate. India is sending Ghulam Nabi Azad, its Minister of Health and Family Welfare. Dr. Srinath Reddy, President of the Public Health Foundation of India, and a member of Arogya World’s Scientific Steering Committee, is a panelist.

Also noteworthy, in the lead up to this meeting, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, published an editorial in the Moscow Times last week – on “The Key to a Happy, Healthy Life.”

A Declaration on NCDs will be issued from the Moscow meeting on the 29th. This is widely expected to have a major influence the final UN Outcomes Document for NCDs.

WHO organized a civil society consultation held today (April 27) called WHO Global Forum: Addressing the challenge of non-communicable diseases, which attracted more than 250 global leaders of civil society, private sector, government, UN, health and academia to outline actions needed the respond to the NCDs epidemic.

The WHO also released today its first NCDs Global Status Report, providing new information on the extent of the epidemics of heart and lung diseases, cancers, diabetes and other NCDs on global and national levels, and the actions needed to prevent and control NCDs.

Throughout the week, we will be following updates from several of our global health colleagues who are attending the meetings. At the end of the week, we will report on the outputs of the Moscow meetings, so stay tuned for more updates from Arogya World on these important NCD meetings in Moscow.