Venue : UN General Assembly Hall , United Nations , New York.

Chaired by Mr.Joseph Deiss , President of the UN General Assembly .

 Dear Friends ,

I am honored to be here , &  have few key points  for the special high level, two-day session that UN will convene in September 2011 for addressing the issue of chronic diseases.

I appreciate the point that UN session talks about local issues across regions . I would further suggest the United Nations that , if we want the governments to act on its recommendations , we must go beyond local i.e. get micro . My experience in public policy makes me believe that governments do appreciate and act on recommendations that are local but also focus on micro issues .

We have mega goals but  our actions have to be micro and we must suggest inputs that are local and at  micro level,  for execution.

Also, let us  accept the fact that for this generation , we are late, and we have already missed the bus . What I would not like is, that our next generation sits in the same UN General Assembly hall after 40 years , and discusses the same issues related to chronic diseases , and says that ‘our earlier generation behaved irresponsibly and did nothing for us ! ’. So the time has come for us to distinguish the ‘Urgent’ & ‘Important’ . Urgent is that we must fix the issues related to the chronic diseases now , but it is more Important  that we plan to build a healthier next generation . So my expectation from the UN is,  that  there will be a dedicated session related to Child health at the UN General Assembly in September .

Also that,  the technology is becoming all-pervasive and we must use this UN session to promote the use of  mHealth to address the issue of chronic diseases . I am expecting that the UN general assembly will dedicate a session to mHealth, and how it can help in the delivery of care for chronic diseases.

 Lastly , I would like to run a quick survey on ABCDE of  Chronic Diseases / Healthcare . Where,  A stands for – Asthma/ Arthritis , B stands for Blood Pressure , C stands for CVD / Cancer , D stands for Diabetes & E stands for Epilepsy / Elderly patients ( as 84 % of all the elderly patients are on one or more medications)

If anyone of you or your immediate family members have any of these ABCDE , please raise hands .

The response is unbelievable ! I have made a point . It is not about the 5 or 10 % prevalence rate of chronic diseases. We have just now had the visual proof of the prevalence of chronic diseases , and it is much higher than the figures that we read often .

It’s time to act now .

Thank you.

Rajendra Pratap Gupta

The points i talked about as mentioned above ,were highlighted by Sir George Alleyne , UN Special Envoy in his closing remarks.