PT seeks census on child obesity
Martes, 9 de Febrero de 2010
BY MAURICIO GONZÁLEZ
MEXICO CITY – Every day the number of children suffering from child obesity in Mexico City increases, which is why it is necessary to implement health and preventive policies that will facilitate the detection and control of this disease, Deputy Juan Pablo Pérez Mejía of the Labor Party (PT), recently said in the Legislative Assembly of Mexico City (ALDF).
Deputy Pérez, also a member of the Citizen’s Participation Commission of the ALDF, said that he will submit a proposal to Mexico City’s Government to take a census of children’s health in the city. This census would evaluate all children that live in the city in order to examine the state of health of this sector of the population in terms of obesity.
Similarly, he said that this mechanism, which would consist of an electronic file, would provide “truthful” statistics that will allow the creation of efficient public policies to prevent children from being obese.
“As long as we do not have efficient public policies in terms of prevention and control of child obesity, we will continue being the country with the largest number of obese children worldwide,” he stated.
The PT legislator noted that the information on health and child pathologies in the Federal District is obsolete as it does not include the necessary monitoring, nor the necessary order and analysis to generate full and precise diagnoses with clinical clarity.
He outlined that a high percentage of children do not have social security, and even less is known about the number of children that have access to this right. He also characterized the methods employed in basic education schools for the detection of illnesses as rudimentary and imprecise, not to mention the monitoring of these cases.
He stated that child obesity represents a serious problem that the authorities must address, as this illness leads to other more serious conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases.
He specified that child obesity goes hand in hand with the irresponsibility of businesses that live off the sale of “chatarra” or junk food products. It is also aggravated by the absence of public policies that permit the mass consumption of junk food, particularly within public schools. This contributes to the fact that Mexico occupies first place in the world for child obesity, he concluded.
Last year, according to a survey by the National Institute of Medicine and Nutrition Sciences given to 1,100 children between 6 and 12 years old, 41.8 percent were either overweight or obese, and 15.1 were diabetic.
It’s necessary to control the problem and prevent it in the future, especially among young people, because if this trend is not reversed, the number of chronically ill people in Mexico will be huge, and it will be impossible to sustain the health system.
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