India has a huge bad heart problem

[ensho]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JE08Df02.html


Warning signs of Indian heart crisis


As if a crippling medical manpower crunch - with just one doctor currently available for every 10,000 Indians - wasn't bad enough, India is also poised to hold a whopping 60% of the world's heart disease patients by 2010, according to a recent study by the British journal The Lancet.

The groundbreaking study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Dr Denis Xavier of St John's National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore, studied 21,000 heart attack patients admitted to 89 hospitals in 50 cities across the country. It found that while the cardiac risk factors in India - excessive tobacco consumption, high lipid levels in the blood due to fat-rich diets and hypertension - weren't dissimilar to those in other nations, what disadvantaged Indians further was the time it took for them to access medical help.

On average, it takes 300 minutes - five hours - for an Indian heart patient get to a hospital, twice the time taken in developed nations. What's worse, very few of these patients are ferried to hospitals by an ambulance due to financial constraints and must use private or public transport. Also, poverty precludes a sizeable chunk of Indians from obtaining routine treatment, including surgical procedures.

-snip-

"But while you can't fight your genes, you can certainly alter your lifestyle," advises Dr Gupta. Lifestyle modification, asserts the doctor, is thus the need of the hour. "We're sitting on a time bomb and unless we do something proactively about it, heart disease can literally kill India."
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food, water, health, worldwide is getting critical


(and alcohol is killing Russia)

[Mountainman]

1. While our insurance companies want to send us to India for surgery!