India faces the risk of growing cancer epidemic as its population experiences rising incomes and changing food habits amid increasing physical inactivity, the WHO warned on Thursday.
“Physical inactivity is very high in India,” Dr Timorthy Armstrong, a WHO official on chronic diseases, told PTI. “There is real opportunity for community interventions in spreading the importance of physical activities in India.”
“The public is willing to engage in physical activity and governments must develop policies that can protect people’s health and prevent diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer,” he said.
Having become the so-called global IT services hub, India’s rising middle class has become physically more inactive due to sedentary working habits despite increasing consumption of high-calorie fast foods.
India is now on the cusp of becoming the country with highest cardio-vascular diseases, including cancers.
Though India currently suffers more from cancers caused by tobacco-chewing as well as cervical cancer in women, it would soon face the threat of other stomach and other related cancers due to increasing physical inactivity among its people.
Regular physical activity reduces the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, diabetes, hypertension, colon cancer, breast cancer, osteoporosis, and depression. Indian women face growing incidence of cervical cancer which is caused by human pailloma virus that is sexually transmitted.