After last month's United Nations' General Assembly in New York, with its inclusion of health and population topics such as the growing numbers of refugees and migrants internationally, and the mounting threat of anti-microbial resistance, we in global public health now turn our attention to the U.N. Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador beginning October 17, and specifically, the Agreed Draft of the New Urban Agenda, Habitat III's central document-in-progress.
My concern lies with our ability to anticipate and prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the world's urban areas. The rising prevalence of obesity, the persistence of smoking, and the sources of air pollution, to name a few, simply have not been addressed by engineers and bureaucrats as fiercely and consistently as the threat of infectious disease. There are reasons for this: for one, we attribute NCDs to the consequences of human choice though we know that the built environment plays a significant role in behavior and the decline in physical activity; aggressive marketing of harmful products in consumption choices; and limited investment in infrastructure to polluting transit. What's more, the tendency for rapid urbanization to outpace measures to provide adequate water, sanitation, housing and attention to air pollution and sprawl is reprising a history of unmanaged urbanization that has played out from the nineteenth century to the present day in many wealthy nations.
â?¨
