The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a health awareness project through a medium of caller tunes.
According to WHO, ‘Donate your caller tune’ is an initiative for which prominent celebrities have lent their voice to create effective health messages.
A donation is made when people give up their regular caller tunes to replace them with any of the health awareness messages.
One can also donate by logging on to www.donateyourcallertune.in.
The effective health messages exhort people to change their lifestyle and lead a healthy life by spreading awareness about healthy food, blood pressure, stress, obesity, breast cancer, and blood sugar.
“The idea is to reach out with creative messages for adopting healthy lifestyles. The initiative underscores the need to deal with the challenges that Indian society faces. This is a non-traditional way of bringing people on board asking them to take responsibility for their own health,” said Dr Nata Menabde, WHO representative to India.
K N Desiraju, secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, who was present at the launch, said: “We are facing a growing burden of non-communicable diseases, a large proportion of which are preventable to a large extent through modifying behavioural risk factors like unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity, consumption of tobacco products and alcohol. It is important we explore innovative medium such as this to create awareness among people.”
About 53% of the deaths in India are due to non-communicable diseases like cardio vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and lung diseases, said Anshu Prakash, joint secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. “Most of the diseases are preventive and treatable but it can be controlled only if it is detected early. WHO has come up with quite an innovative way of spreading messages about non-communicable diseases,” he added.
K N Desiraju, secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, who was present at the launch, said: “We are facing a growing burden of non-communicable diseases, a large proportion of which are preventable to a large extent through modifying behavioural risk factors like unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity, consumption of tobacco products and alcohol. It is important we explore innovative medium such as this to create awareness among people.”
About 53% of the deaths in India are due to non-communicable diseases like cardio vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes and lung diseases, said Anshu Prakash, joint secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. “Most of the diseases are preventive and treatable but it can be controlled only if it is detected early. WHO has come up with quite an innovative way of spreading messages about non-communicable diseases,” he added.