75th World Health Assembly begins

The 75th World Health Assembly (WHA75) is being held in Geneva, Switzerland, from Sunday (22 May) and will continue until 28 May with this year's motto being: Health for peace, peace for health.

The assembly will emphasise the need of utilising research, data, technology, and innovation to build a healthy and peaceful world that is currently threatened by conflict, inequity, the climate catastrophe, and pandemics.

Aiming WHA75, non communicable diseases (NCD) Alliance developed a Civil Society Advocacy Briefing, dealing with all relevant NCD items in the NCD-related WHA75 agenda and will be presenting in today's session at 8pm Bangladesh Time.

The briefing provides background and key advocacy messages on the NCD Alliance's priorities for the WHA75, aligning with the NCD Agenda (Provisional agenda item 14.1) outlined in the official documents.

The all-inclusive response to the Covid-19 epidemic was insufficient, exposing international solidarity failings and exacerbating disparities, reads a press release.

People with NCDs have been at the epicenter of this issue, especially in low-and middle-income nations, as several NCDs have been linked to more severe Covid-19 outcomes. The need for action on NCDs is clear: countries will not be prepared for the next epidemic or health hazard unless governments act and invest more in NCDs. In the Civil Society Advocacy Brief, some 15 recommendations of the NCD community call to action include - the inclusion of people living with NCDs (PLWNCDs) in multistakeholder engagement as co-developers and co-designers of their country's NCD principles, policies, programmes and services. Together with developing a clear guideline for multistakeholder engagement, WHO and Member States (MS) are advocated for the inclusion and quality of NCD indicators in monitoring for PHC and UHC (Annex-1); grounding on the five global diabetes coverage targets for achievement by 2030, MS are recommended to increasing the scope of these goals, as a person living with type 1 diabetes cannot survive without insulin, and therefore pushing the 80% ambition of diagnosis to 100% is suggested.