More partners needed to address healthcare

REFERRING to the letter “Beating Malaysia’s top preventable diseases” (The Star, July 5), we concur with the authors who provided a brief overview on the issue of non-communicable diseases (NCD) globally and in Malaysia.

The National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) 2015 showed a four-fold increase in obesity prevalence from 4.4% in 1996 to 17.7% in 2015, whereas type 2 diabetes increased from 11.5% in 2006 to 17.5% in 2015. In the same period, the overall prevalence of hypertension rose to 30.3%.