UK must tackle road crashes, skin cancer, and asthma

UK must tackle road crashes, skin cancer, and asthma to reduce burden of disease, agency says

Klaus Morales

The UK Health Protection Agency has identified four important sources of illness and death where changes could be made to significantly improve public health. They are traffic crashes, unintentional poisonings, malignant melanoma, and asthma.

The agency’s latest report, published last week, says: "As these incidents impact on the young, are preventable and affect society through loss of working life years, they should be a focus for future work."

The agency says that the report’s aim was to assess the burden of disease and work out areas in which, through working with partners and other health organisations, it could make an important difference.

Building on work that has quantified the burden of infectious diseases (which in England cost about £6bn ($10.6bn; €8.8bn) a year to treat), the report applied the same principles in assessing the burden of non-infectious diseases associated with radiation, chemicals, poisons, and pollution.

At the report’s launch Pat Troop, chief executive of the agency, said: "This is very much a first stage in the process of quantifying the totality of the burden of disease, particularly in the area of environmentally linked non-infectious disease.

"It is clear from the study that the greatest burden from non-infectious diseases associated with environmental threats will be long term, chronic disease. This will impact most on the primary sector and the wider community."

One of the report’s conclusions is that a more comprehensive approach is needed in managing non-infectious diseases. It says, "The burden of many of these non-infectious diseases in multifactorial and complex, so it is difficult to quantify the individual elements behind a particular disease. For example, asthma can be linked to infections, allergies, indoor and outdoor pollution, or household moulds so we need to develop a holistic approach as opposed to tackling the various aspects in a piecemeal aspect."

The report also points out that:

• More than 100 000 new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed every year in Britain, including around 7000 new cases of malignant melanoma,
• Air pollution may affect the long term lung function of as many as 57 in every 1000 children in England and Wales,
• In England and Wales 20% of children have asthma, and an estimated 30% of acute exacerbations of childhood asthma are related to outdoor air pollution,
• The cost of to the NHS of poisonings is about £110m, excluding the cost of attendances at emergency departments; however, most deaths in the UK from poisoning occur outside hospitals, and
• About 5% of health service expenditure is on treating injuries.

Health Protection in the 21st Century: Understanding the Burden of Disease; Preparing for the Future is at www.hpa.org.uk/publications /