More about ProCOR mission

With improved control of infectious diseases in developing countries, more people survive to adulthood. Aging, urbanization, crowding, industrialization, and adoption of westernized life styles, including smoking, processed and junk food, emotional stress and physical inactivity are changing disease patterns. Non-communicable diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), are increasing rapidly, though prevalent communicable diseases continue to exact an inordinate toll in disability and death. The two co-exist, compounding the drain on shrinking health budgets. The societal impact is to further enfeeble weak economies and undermine fledgling democratic institutions.

Two decades ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that CVDs, including hypertension, stroke and coronary artery disease, were emerging as a public health problem in the developing world. Recent data clearly confirm this trend. Today, approximately over one half of the 14.3 million annual cardiovascular deaths worldwide occur in the developing world. Already, CVDs are the leading causes of death and premature disability in many developing countries. Future projections appear even grimmer. We now confront a double epidemic afflicting developing countries: while far too burdened with the diseases of poverty, they are at the same time assaulted with the diseases associated with affluence.

Regrettably, our ability to deal with this emerging epidemic is hindered by two factors: first, a paucity of reliable epidemiological data about incidence, prevalence, and trends in disease occurrence, and second, an absence of adequate resource allocation by the international community. We therefore aim to heighten awareness of the magnitude of the health crisis confronting developing countries by launching a broad dialogue among those interested. This is to be a dialogue of equals where members of diverse constituencies from the medical profession, from among health care providers, from among those responsible for shaping and implementing health policy, and from other interested groups, share know how, experience, ideas, and proposals. We believe that opening a readily available channel for international dialogue, using email and the Internet, will expeditiously help shape an agenda as well as contribute to defining priorities.

The Lown Cardiovascular Center has joined efforts with SATELLIFE, the global communication network for health promotion in developing countries, to establish an international Internet-based network. This network, designated ProCOR, the Global Electronic Conference on Cardiovascular Health in the Developing World, will constitute a platform for interchanging views and for sharing information. ProCOR will enable participants to share ideas on diverse aspects of CVDs as they are now emerging in developing countries.

The answers evolved in coping with CVDs in the industrialized North may be inappropriate in addressing the new epidemic in the South. The essential strategy in the North has been to focus on curative rather than preventive approaches involving prodigious capital investments in high technology managed by super-specialists. This approach has proved far too costly, even for the United States of America. Although the USA now allocates 14 percent of its gross national product for health, or about a $1 trillion annually, 40 million are bereft of any health care insurance and another 35 million have coverage only for catastrophic disease with large out-of-pocket contributions. The USA is currently aggressively diminishing health care costs. In fact, the richest country in the world can not afford a technology-based solution for CVDs. Yet the tendency in a number of developing countries is to emulate a failed model.

The initiation of ProCOR therefore assumes urgency compelled by the burgeoning problem as well as the danger of focusing on curative rather than preventive approaches.