Frieden’s Next Act : Heart Disease and Preparing for New Epidemics - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/science/tom-frieden-heart-disease-epidemics.html
After running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for eight years under President Obama, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden is starting a global health initiative that will focus on two big areas: heart health and epidemic preparedness.
Called #Resolve, it is funded with $225 million over five years by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The program will be based at Vital Strategies, a public health nonprofit in New York, the city where Dr. Frieden served as health commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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The top priority
Hands down, blood pressure control is the most important thing you can do in health care. Globally, we’re at 14 percent control. U.S. is about 54, 55 percent. At the C.D.C. we did a couple of pilots; Malawi went from 0 to 35 percent in 15 months.
You can have big improvements, but you’ll only do that if you simplify treatment, if you decentralize it so people close to the patient can do it and if you use an information system that tells you how you’re doing.
All the medicines are generic. The costs that people are paying and that governments are paying are probably well over twice as much as they need to be.
If you decided as a country or a state or a province or a world, we’re going to use these four drugs, your costs would come down many many fold.
Of the 1.5 billion today people with #hypertension 1.1 billion don’t have it controlled.