The Vice President Prof. Gilbert Bukenya delivers a lecture at the Second World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany

The Vice President Prof. Gilbert Bukenya has called on the international community to join Africa in realizing global health.

Prof. Bukenya who was in Berlin, Germany to present a scientific paper on ‘How to bridge the North South Gap’ in the World Health Summit, 2010, was delivering a keynote address on; ‘The Emerging New Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa with examples from Uganda.

The Vice President emphasized global action to curb the rising non-infectious diseases like Cancer, hypertension, diabetes and brain hunger.
“It is estimated that in the next five years, there will be 60,000 cancer cases in Uganda and 85% of cancer patients are from the rural areas amongst the poor, vulnerable.

Currently in Uganda, only 4 percent of cancer patients are attended to at the Uganda Cancer Institute leaving the majority to die without care.
He added that the Uganda Heart institute’s contribution of only 3% for both the public and private sectors towards accessing treatment is worrying.

Prof. Bukenya also pointed out the high cost of treating these diseases locally, for example, breast cancer at US $ 1000, diabetes at US$ 950 and hypertension at US$ 800 comparing these figures to the per capita income of Uganda which is US$ 400 is prohibitive.

The Vice President therefore called for a massive awareness campaign and increased political will to curb the problem as well as remodeling of the health system to address the non infectious diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prof. Bukenya urged Africa to learn and borrow from the experiences in Europe and North America to set up mass campaigns saying that this should be spearheaded by the World Health Organisation Regional office in Africa.
He noted that the World Health Summit was a perfect forum to sound a warning and an appeal for global action.

Prof. Stefan Kaufman Director Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology Department of Immunology who chaired the Panel Discussion on “How to Bridge the North-South Health Gap” greatly thanked Prof. Bukenya for the great contributions made especially the stimulating introductory talk he made that broadenedww. the perspective of the panel discussion. It drew attention to issues of both communicable and non-communicable diseases and the excellent contributions made by the panelists made the highlight of the whole World Health Summit.

The lecture followed commitments from the panel discussions like the Executive Director of Global Fund Michel Kazachkine and the Managing director, Policy and Performance Global Alliance for Vaccines (GAVI), Nina Schwalbe, who showed great interest in increasing support especially in regard to funding programmes to combat non communicable diseases in Africa. Other discussants were, Michel Sedibe, Executive Director UNAIDS, , Rwandan Health Minister Sezibera.