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The fight against non-communicable disease in emerging economies

Health-care providers in low- and middle-income countries are shifting their focus away from infections, and towards the bigger problems of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
  1. Charles Schmidt

    1. Charles Schmidt is a science writer based in Portland, Maine.

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In the mid-2000s, a physician named Jaime Miranda began looking into how urban migration was affecting the health of people in his native Peru. Rural villagers fleeing political violence were descending on the capital, Lima, and Miranda noticed that these urban transplants seemed prone to obesity, type 2 diabetes and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Miranda wanted to compare rates of NCDs in these migrants with those in other Peruvian populations. But doing so was a challenge: NCD surveys were almost non-existent in the country. “We had no good way to estimate the magnitude of the problem,” Miranda says.

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Nature 562, S65-S67 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06974-1

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Science without borders, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

References

  1. World Health Organization. Noncommunicable diseases http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases (2018).

  2. Ajay, V. S. et al. J. Am. Heart Assoc. 5, e004343 (2016).

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  3. Staimez, L. R. et al. Diabetes Care 36, 2772–2778 (2013).

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