Need for more healthy Malaysians

Recently, ads on TV try to bring home the point that health is an important component of wealth generation in the country. Well, it was reported that the financial burden of the Malaysian Government to treat various non communicable diseases or NCDs for short, ran into hundreds of millions of ringgit per illness every year. The World Health Organisation definition of NCDs include cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.NCDs are the biggest cause of death in Southeast Asia. Basically you can say NCDs are lifestyle illnesses. It is not infectious, that is it is not spread by virus nor bacteria. But bad lifestyle habits like unhealthy diets, sedentary living, and smoking are the primary cause of one third of these illnesses.Obesity alone leads to many expensive, chronic conditions (NCDs) that include high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer.

The Star online on Wednesday reported that the 2006 National Health and Morbidity Survey showed that Malaysians with diabetes had increased from 8.3% in 1998 to 14.9% now, overweight adults from 16% to 29.1%, and those who are obese from 4% to 14%.


The Health Ministry are coming up with suggestions that the promotion of good lifestyle habits be incorporated into housing development schemes.The public and private sectors are thus encouraged to promote awareness to fight NCDs.

Allocating space in homes specifically for exercise and increasing police presence in parks to keep the public safe while they work out are among proposals in a Cabinet paper to reduce the number of Malaysians with diseases like diabetes, hypertension and obesity.

There could be a change in housing policies where there are more health-friendly spaces set for exercise or having police personnel at parks so people will be more encouraged to jog because they will be assured of their safety,” said Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai.

The Minister may be too paranoid in suggesting that we have policemen manning the parks while we exercise. The police have so many things on their plate; snatch thieves, robbers and  traffic offenders, followed by white collar criminals, illegal immigants and foreign workers as well as political offenders.Now they have to take care of people who want to get a bit of fresh air! I don't think our crime rate at parks is so scary that we have to have the men in blue doing their rounds. Maybe park wardens monitoring activities at the parks while we jog and play with our children would be sufficient. We keep the police out until there are really bad hats doing harm at the parks.

Maybe there are other ways to make the people more health conscious. Giving monetary incentives is one.

To promote good health habits which leads to healthy citizens, which in turn leads to reduced health costs to the nation, the government could provide:

tax rebates for employers to provide sports and gymnasium facilities at the workplace.
tax rebates for taxpayers who enroll in private funded sports clubs and gymnasiums.
tax rebates for resident associations and private social clubs who provide the same facilities.
tax rebates for individual taxpayers to purchase exercise and sports equipment or home gymnasium equipment to play and exercise at home.

The above proposals are similar to the tax rebates already given to purchase personal computers, and books and reading materials.

The Ministry of Health has spent millions of Ringgit on health education campaigns which do not make good the amount spent compared to the effect the campaigns has on society.Perhaps giving monetary incentives will give better results.