TEHRAN (Iran News) –The first phase of a national health campaign started on Saturday with the aim of reducing deaths caused by non-communicable diseases.

The project with the theme of “earlier awareness, better care” will continue until January 5, 2024, ISNA reported.

Nowadays, health is one of the most essential human needs. Before the coronavirus pandemic, people may not have realized its importance, but this disease showed us how precious health is, Health Minister Bahram Einollahi said at a ceremony to unveil the Campaign.

“Maybe everyone thinks that our job is treatment, but it is not true. Our main duty is to prevent diseases and promote health.”

For this reason, we started a project called “national health campaign” on November 11, which will continue till January 5, 2024.

Emphasizing the importance of improving health literacy, Einollahi said, “The level of literacy in the society has increased, and we expect this level to improve in the field of health as well. Also, we hope to manage having an electronic health file for every Iranian with their national identification code to record the history of illnesses in their family, their lifestyle, etc. so that their diseases and their reasons can be traced easily.”

He emphasized the campaign should include over 70 percent of the country’s population; there is full preparation for its implementation in all universities of medical sciences, and everyone is mobilized to implement the plan.

Einollahi added: “Currently, with the decrease of communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases have increased, so that they are responsible for 83 percent of deaths.

Every year, some 300,000 people die in the country due to non-communicable diseases, and more than 150,000 deaths are caused by cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, diabetes accounts for 30,000 deaths every year.”

Some 32 percent of people over 18 years of age in Iran have high blood pressure, he said, adding that many may not have even checked their blood pressure once.

The health minister emphasized, “We hope to be able to prevent half a million deaths due to cardiovascular disease and 30 thousand deaths due to diabetes till 2030 with timely awareness.”

More than 220,000 deaths, that is, about 89 percent of deaths per year, are caused by factors such as blood pressure, blood sugar, obesity, and overweight, he concluded.

Over the past 20 years, deaths caused by NCDs have risen by 14.5 percent. In 2016, 304,400 premature deaths were caused by NCDs in Iran, according to WHO.

Cardiovascular diseases have the highest share of 43 percent of the total deaths caused by NCDs.

Some 0.5 percent of premature deaths happen before the age of 70 and 2 percent before the age of 50.

In September 2022, Health Minister Bahram Einollahi said that Iran has one of the strongest health systems in the region and that this opportunity should be used optimally in the field of health diplomacy.

Based on innovative indicators of health technology development in 2021, Iran was ranked 60th among 132 countries, which shows an improvement of 60 steps compared to 2014, Younes Panahi, the deputy health minister for research and technology, has announced.

In June 2021, Ahmed al-Mandhari, the World Health Organization director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, said the Islamic Republic of Iran is a role model for primary health care.

The national budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year 1402, which starts on March 21, has increased the health sector’s budget by 29 percent compared to the current year’s budget.

The bill has proposed a budget of 2,730 trillion rials (about $6.8 billion) for the Ministry of Health, IRNA reported.

The administration has also proposed 690 trillion rials (about $1.7 billion) as subsidies to provide medicine by health industries.