The cost of illness: Valuing an ounce of prevention

The Ides of March treated our friends up north harshly—sleet and snow, scandal in the Justice Department and the four-year anniversary of an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. Can you blame President Bush for slipping south of the border?

Yet even in this sunny oasis, we can’t escape some things. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, nothing is certain but death and taxes.

But both can be postponed. For all of you Americans having trouble meeting the April 15 tax filing deadline, there’s that fabulous—perfectly legal—loophole called an extension.

And the death part? There’s plenty that can be done on that front too. At a recent conference hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, more than 300 doctors, researchers and community leaders laid out an array of simple steps that we should get serious about following.

Bottom line: we are what we eat, and drink, and breathe and do. Or don’t do. More and more, if we’re sick, we have mainly ourselves to blame. Oh sure, we’ve all heard this lecture before. Stop smoking, eat five portions of fruits and vegetables each day, get off the couch, take a hike.

But to hear the argument in economic terms elevates healthy living to a public policy issue bordering on crisis. In the United States, Mexico and 33 other member nations of the Pan America Health Organization (PAHO), chronic non-communicable diseases are the “greatest cause of premature death” and illness, according to data collected by PAHO.

In other words, it’s not exotic killers such as anthrax and ebola, or the common illnesses like AIDS and influenza, that cost the most lives and money. It’s the more mundane –often preventable–diseases such as diabetes, cancer, respiratory illness and heart ailments that take the major toll.

“In 2005, an estimated 35 million people worldwide died from chronic diseases; that is double the number of deaths from infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis), maternal and perinatal conditions and nutritional deficiencies combined,” according to an analysis by PAHO. Seventy percent of deaths in the US each year are attributable to chronic disease.