Partnership For Healthy Cities To Prevent Noncommunicable Diseases

Noncommunicable diseases, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases, cause 80 percent of deaths worldwide. Cities play an important role in the prevention of noncommunicable diseases and injuries as around half of the world population lives in urban settings, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Bloomberg Philanthropies and the World Health Organization launched a Partnership for Healthy Cities on 23 May. The partnership embodies the vision of Michael Bloomberg, the Ambassador of the World Health Organisation of Noncommunicable Diseases. The establishment of 100 percent tobacco-free indoor public spaces has been his signature as a “public health mayor” of New York City.

The Partnership for Healthy Cities aims at enabling cities to deliver a high-impact policy or programmatic intervention to reduce risk factors of noncommunicable diseases and injuries.

Forty-three cities located in high, middle and low-income countries have signed up for the partnership. London, San Francisco, Cape Town and Mumbai are among them. Each city receives technical and financial support for the implementation of an intervention to prevent noncommunicable diseases. The interventions are related to different topics such as tobacco advertising, road safety and clean indoor air.

The interventions of the partnership are directly linked to Goal number 11 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, and with the Shanghai Declaration on Promoting Health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of 2016. The partnership aims at giving people in cities the opportunity to make a choice for themselves and for their health.

Elise De Geyter is an intern at Intellectual Property Watch and a candidate for the LLM Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the National University of Singapore (class 2017).

 

Image Credits: Elise De Geyter