Chester Sam­bra­no

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has called for ro­bust and tar­get­ed ap­proach­es to ad­dress mar­ket­ing strate­gies used by multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions which en­cour­age in­creased con­sump­tion of fast food by teens and ado­les­cents, with the aim of pre­vent­ing an ex­plo­sive in­crease in the rate of Non-Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases (NCDs) in­clud­ing Can­cers.

Ac­cord­ing to the me­dia re­alise from the Min­istry of Health, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh made the call dur­ing his de­liv­ery of the na­tion­al state­ment, at the 76th World Health As­sem­bly cur­rent­ly tak­ing place in Gene­va, Switzer­land, where he high­light­ed the scourge of NCDs and called for more ro­bust, tar­get­ed ac­tion on this front.

It said with Trinidad and To­ba­go list­ed as one of the 28 front-run­ner coun­tries set to re­ceive sup­port from the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) to im­ple­ment strate­gies aimed at pre­ven­tion and man­age­ment, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh not­ed that un­re­pressed ex­pan­sion of NCDs posed dev­as­tat­ing glob­al health con­se­quences for in­di­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties, and threat­ens to over­whelm health sys­tems around the world.