A Long But Disease-Stricken Life

Making money to pay for lifestyle diseases?

Knowing that we all will have to die someday, we want to live every moment we pass around. There is hardly anyone who doesn’t want to see ‘tomorrow’ everyday! There is a saying that, ‘We people are the only beings who want to be alive even after death! We want to live more in any way, perhaps, and that is why we do not hesitate to spend a lot of money for availing of medicare services.

A senior friend of us, serving a multinational company, said the other day that most of the patients cardiac at a reputed hospital in one of Dhaka’s affluent areas are successful businessmen. ‘The stress and tension they take as well as their lifestyle have made them so vulnerable to lifestyle diseases,’ he said quoting doctor, who, however, would not make any formal statement on the professional category of patients.

In fact, a 2011 medical survey revealed that almost 99 percent Bangladesh people aged above 25 years have been exposed to at least one of three chronic diseases - cancer, diabetes and heart ailments due to unhealthy lifestyle. Increasing affluence and purchasing power is said to be the key reason for the spread of these ‘noncommunicable diseases’ or in other words lifestyle diseases. Globally, a Washington University study recently said, despite progress fighting killer infectious diseases, people now lead longer and sicker lives with health problems incurring a wave of financial and social costs – findings that, researchers described as devastating irony.