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'This Is a Public Health Emergency' -- Sunday Gazette-Mail, West Virginia

Continuing the “The Shape We're In” series, Kate Long reports on the chronic diseases obese children in West Virginia are facing and the focus on what needs to be done to help treat these children and prevent others from becoming sick adults. "Whole families arrive…from rural counties with their [obese] children…One heavy child after another walks [into, West Virginia University pediatrician, Dr. Pamela Murray’s office]…with high blood pressure and cholesterol…Nidia Henderson, wellness director of the West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency, sees the same thing…The national obesity crisis is hitting West Virginia hard,' she said…Every West Virginian is affected, whether they know it or not. In 2009, health care economist Ken Thorpe warned West Virginia legislators that, if the state can't reduce the number of people of all ages with chronic diseases, its total health care spending -- public, private, everyone -- will double by 2018, to $22.5 billion a year. Adult West Virginians are used to seeing themselves at the top of lists for heart attacks, strokes and one chronic disease after another: diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney failure. But how many realize obesity is a leading cause of each disease? 'Lower obesity, and you lower the rest,' Thorpe told the Legislature. It's a domino effect…Obesity leads to diabetes, diabetes leads to heart disease and so forth. Children raise a red flag for West Virginia's future, said Jamie Jeffrey, director of the Children's Medicine Center at CAMC Women and Children's Hospital…'One in three children we see now is at risk of future heart disease and diabetes because of obesity'…The extremes have become more common, she said…'Children need to be included in every discussion of chronic disease reduction in this state. The discussion needs to start there. But when people talk about doing something about chronic disease, they usually talk about programs that will help adults…to make a difference in the obesity epidemic we're seei...

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Source: Harvard World Health News - Wednesday, 22 February


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