Africa

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Members of the Alliance for Food Health, a collective of organisations and academics, called in Mexico for better regulation of advertising of junk food aimed at children and of food and beverage labelling, during the launch of the report “A childhood hooked on obesity” in Mexico City. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By N Chandra Mohan
NEW DELHI, Feb 28 2020 (IPS)

Paradoxically, when the number of people suffering from undernourishment or hunger has risen in the world, so, too, have those afflicted by overweight and obesity. Latin America’s second largest economy, Mexico, for instance, is currently battling one of the world’s largest epidemics of obesity and its success is bound to be emulated by countries of the South. The numbers involved are staggering. The director-general of the National Institute of Public Health, Dr Juan Rivera told the Financial Times that “seventy five percent of adults and 35 percent of children and adolescents are overweight or obese… The State has a duty to protect public health.”

Mexico’s public health crisis is reflected in the third edition of the Food Sustainability Index (FSI) – based on the pillars of sustainable agriculture, food loss/waste and nutritional challenges — developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition in Italy. Nutritional challenges in particular are tracked by several indicators like life quality (prevalence of malnourishment, micronutrient deficiency), life expectancy (prevalence of overnourishment, impact on health) and dietary patterns (diet composition, number of people per fast food restaurant and quality of policy response to dietary patterns).

Out of a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 represents the greatest progress towards meeting a performance indicator, Mexico registered low scores of 13.9 on the prevalence of overnourishment or overweight that ranks it 61st out of 67 countries tracked by the FSI.The share of those who are overweight among adults and children are also broadly in line with what was indicated by Dr Rivera. Mexican diets have high levels of sugar with a score of 10.3 that places it among the bottom five out of the 67 countries as per this indicator. The score for the number of people per fast food restaurant is also rather low at 1.9.

N Chandra Mohan

However, Mexico is in the top five countries for its policy response to dietary patterns. The country now plans to have a compulsory labeling system in place by March whereby food and beverage products sold in the country will have warnings that they “contain too much sugar” or “too many calories” or “too much fat”. In 2014, this country imposed taxes on sugar in foods like soft drinks and junk food. But this taxation route has had a limited impact in curbing consumption of these items as obesity has acquired epidemic proportions. Non-communicable diseases in the population have also increased like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

The proximate causes of this obesity epidemic stem from more and more Mexicans living in urban areas with economic development. Only a fifth now resides in rural areas. Urbanisation in turn has been associated with shifts in dietary patterns from traditional foods including fruits and vegetables towards low-cost energy-dense foods that are high in sugar and deficient in micronutrients. Metropolitan life styles are also sedentary than living in the rural countryside. With the consumption of more fast food and sugary drinks, the energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended is manifested in overweight and obesity.

To combat obesity, a welcome factor of change is that local communities, especially in Mexico’s countryside, are also getting involved in this effort. Last year, IPS reported the efforts of the non-governmental Amaranth Network in the Mixteca region, in the southern state of Oaxaca, to grow a native crop amaranth alongside traditional corn and beans. The inclusion of amaranth with other high protein seeds helps to significantly improve the nutritional quality of diets. The cultivation of this crop has produced benefits such as the organisation of farmers, processors and consumers and much-needed public funding to scale up this laudable initiative.

In contrast to Mexico, elsewhere in the South – in vast parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia like India — the problem is much grimmer with the paradox of undernourishment or hunger coexisting with obesity. This double burden of malnutrition co-exists within countries, within communities and also within households according to Dr Raghav Gaiha, Professorial Research Fellow, University of Manchester. The excess energy from low-cost energy-dense food can affect children and adults within the same household differently: The children may use up the excess energy and remain underweight while adults are likely to become overweight.

In India, for instance, the ranks of the hungry are also set to further rise with domestic food prices (including global as well) going through the roof amidst a sharp slowdown in overall economic growth. This can constrain budgetary resources for vastly stepping up outlays for nutrition initiatives for children through schemes like the Integrated Child Development Services and Mid-day Meals Programme. The provision of healthy food items like millets and pulses through the nationwide public distribution system is also necessary. The prevalence of hunger with rising obesity calls for best practices to be shared within the South.

N Chandra Mohan is an economics and business commentator

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Civil protection volunteers engaged in health checks at the "Milano Malpensa" airport. This week a joint team between WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control arrived in Rome to review the public health measures put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Courtesy: Dipartimento Protezione Civile

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 2020 (IPS)

Just a month since the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus a public health emergency, it is now taking steps to contain misinformation being spread about the disease. Globally, there have been more than 82,000 cases of Coronavirus, which has claimed 2,800 lives — the majority being in China, where the disease has been traced to. 

On Thursday, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres reiterated at a talk in New York that it’s not yet a pandemic but urged people to practice caution. 

“We are not yet in a pandemic, but there is a clear risk there and the window of opportunity to avoid it is narrowing,” he said, adding that governments must do everything possible to stop the transmission and to do it now. He also expressed his concern about countries in the developing world that “lack the capacity” to address the massive scale of the issue. 

“This is still the moment to ask for countries to contain the disease and to do everything possible to contain the disease because we’re not yet in an irreversible pandemic,” he said. 

He urged people to avoid stigmatising the illness, and to “have a human rights approach to the way this disease is fought”.

However, as health officials around the world continue to gear up for the disease, which seemingly has no cure, there is another aspect of the crisis to be dealt with: misinformation about it spreading on the internet. 

David P. Fidler, a senior fellow for cybersecurity and global health at the non-profit think tank, Council on Foreign Relations, detailed the issue of misinformation and the harm it does during a health emergency like this. 

“Disinformation threatens health because it undermines confidence in the underlying science, questions the motivations of health professionals, politicises health activities, and creates problems for responses to disease challenges,” he wrote in 2019 about how disinformation during an Ebola outbreak was a major concern. 

He went on to explain that it has historic roots: often, illnesses are mistakenly associated or linked to immigrants or a foreign country in order to perpetuate xenophobic sentiments.

“Spreading misinformation about diseases was a tactic of disinformation campaigns by governments before the social media era,” he wrote. 

IPS caught up with Fidler on how misinformation in the current situation can exacerbate the crisis:

Inter Press Service (IPS): Usually during a crisis like this (or in the past during Ebola or SARS), what is the main challenge in containing misinformation being spread?

David Fidler (DF): In past outbreaks, two factors typically converged to produce problems from information and misinformation: uncertainty about the outbreak on the part of national and international health officials making efforts to address the disease, and lack of trust in the population in the information provided by official sources. These factors appeared in disease outbreaks before the advent of social media, and the scale and intensity of information and misinformation circulating on social media platforms exacerbates the two factors noted above.

In addition, the ease with which misinformation can be spread and amplified on social media has become yet another factor public health officials have to address in dealing with outbreaks. Social media even makes communicating accurate information more difficult. I have seen, across my Twitter feed, a cacophony of attempts to share information that has frustrated experts trying to identify and share the latest information about COVID-19.

 

IPS: What leads to misinformation during times like this?

DF: In the past, people with political agendas would exploit the fear that serious outbreaks create to produce and spread misinformation. Such misinformation in essence weaponised the outbreak for other political purposes. In the age of social media, this “weaponisation” of outbreaks for political purposes has become, for lack of a better term, industrialised by state and non-state actors exploiting the potential of social media to spread misinformation on a scale and at a speed never seen before, especially in the public health context.

 

IPS: What, in your opinion, is currently the biggest misunderstanding about the Coronavirus?

DF: We are seeing, I think, a “triple burden” in the information space concerning COVID-19. First, international and national health officials are struggling to communicate information concerning a new virus about which much is not known.

However, at the international level, WHO has made the information climate worse by praising China’s response even though much of what China has done in trying to address the outbreak in its territory is not consistent with WHO’s recommendations on the outbreak or WHO’s emphasis in the past on responses to outbreaks that do not unnecessarily restrict trade, travel, and human rights. WHO’s credibility, I think, has taken a massive hit. At the national level, we see, for example, the current circus in the U.S. government about communicating to the American people about the outbreak, and I imagine other national governments are also scrambling to get the “messaging” right.

What’s astonishing to me, having studied outbreaks for nearly three decades, is that this communication problem continues to flummox national and international health officials just about every single time–so that “lesson learned” is apparently never actually learned.

Second, we are seeing the weaponisation of the outbreak in the misinformation being circulated for different political purposes. For me, this outbreak is different in that the weaponisation has connected to the change in geopolitics, with the rise of China and worries about China’s growing power and influence sharpening and broadening criticism of China’s response to the outbreak. Here, unlike Ebola in Africa, we have the outbreak entangled with the increasing rawness of balance of power politics between the United States and China.

Third, we have the social media effect where state and non-state actors are spreading misinformation widely and rapidly in a context where no government or international organisation has any effective policy responses to address this problem.

 

IPS: What is your recommendation to the following sections of society to do their role in making sure misinformation doesn’t spread:

 

DF: Policymakers: The touchstones of effective communication during outbreaks have been studied and promulgated frequently, so follow the playbook, including making the most up-to-date information available with great frequency across media outlets in ways accessible to people, and include in the information advice on any steps individuals can take to protect themselves and their families. Rinse and repeat, again and again as the outbreak evolves. The information/misinformation environment is more competitive now because of social media, but the basic principles of effective communication in a crisis context remain valid even amidst more noise.

 

DF: Institutions such as schools and workplaces: School and company leaders should monitor information being released by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and translate that information into actionable steps and plans for the school context and for specific workplace contexts. Again, be fast, frequent, and user-friendly with the information that school and company leaders provide to students and employees.

 

Individuals: Do not rely solely on social media for information about the COVID-19 outbreak and how it might affect you and your family. Visit and re-visit the information provided by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and translate that information into your individual and family circumstances. 

• In order to tackle the misinformation concerns, WHO launched its EPI-WIN initiative, which aims to provide users with timely and accurate information while also filtering through “infodemics”, which the organisation describes as “excessive amount of information about a problem that makes it difficult to identify a solution”. 

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The post Q&A: Misinformation in the Time of an Uncontainable Virus appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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