Top Health Official Stresses Need for Access to Care

Changing a sedentary lifestyle and improving access to medical care are America’s biggest public-health challenges for the next century, a top federal health official said Wednesday.

Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Americans are starting to realize that sprawling waistlines and physical inactivity could shorten their lives.

But Koplan noted that racial disparities in the occurrence of many illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, continue due to medical care that is “costly and is of inconsistent quality.”

“The No. 1 public health challenge we’ve got to sort out fairly quickly is to have some kind of a rational health care system--something that provides access to care for everybody in the country,” Koplan said.

“We go from the very best to rather unacceptable levels of quality. In a rich society like we have, there’s no reason why one group should have a higher risk than another,” he said.

CDC statistics indicate that blacks are more likely than whites to die from cancer and that Hispanics are twice as likely as whites to be diagnosed with diabetes.

Researchers also believe that almost one-third of American adults are physically inactive and 18% are overweight, a state of affairs that may contribute to more than 300,000 premature deaths every year.

“There is an increasingly large body of scientific knowledge that relates obesity to lots of serious illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis and gall bladder disease,” Koplan said.

Government guidelines recommend that adults get at least 30 minutes a day of moderate physical activity most days of the week.