Page 1472 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 2021
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be proud of in our collaborative and sustained efforts to create a healthy Canberra. Canberrans have a healthy city, and that is something worth celebrating and protecting.
The ACT has excellent ambient air quality on most days. However, this is something we cannot take for granted. As we experienced in late 2019 and early 2020, smoke from fires both within our borders and beyond, dust storms, as well as atmospheric conditions that could lead to thunderstorm asthma, can all pose a threat to health. We have a world-class system for measuring and reporting air quality, as well as warning the public of hazardous atmospheric conditions that may affect their health.
Since the 2019-20 fires, further improvements have been made on how we report air quality both in the ACT and nationally. To ensure that we are well placed to address these challenges now and into the future, the ACT government is currently developing an air quality strategy which will outline our whole-of-government approach.
With regard to Healthy People, the evidence is clear. ACT residents are living longer and people in the ACT can also expect to live many years in full health. However, chronic disease remains an ongoing challenge for the ACT and Australia at large and continues to take a toll on our health systems.
In 2017-18 one in two ACT adults reported having a chronic condition such as arthritis, asthma, cancer, diabetes, mental illness or heart disease, and one in five had at least two of these conditions. The leading causes of the disease burden in the ACT were coronary heart disease, anxiety disorders and back pain. However, our incidence of cancer is lower than the national rate. Overweight and obesity is still a leading cause of disease burden. We know by now that fixing this issue is not simply a matter of personal responsibility by leaving it purely up to individuals to solve. For Canberrans to live long, healthy and productive lives we need to keep working on creating a city where the healthy choice is the easy choice.
Our healthy Canberra ACT preventive health plan 2020-2025 details five priority areas to achieve our goal of preventing and reducing chronic disease in our community. Three of the priority areas—healthy weight, healthy eating habits and active lifestyles—are key to further reducing our risk of chronic disease and early death. This report shows us that, positively, the percentage of children aged five to 15 years consuming sugar-sweetened beverages in the ACT is continuing to trend down.
Physical activity is higher for ACT adults than the national average and more children are actively travelling to school. However, surveys conducted over the past decade have reported that at least one in five children in the ACT are overweight or obese. While the latest figures suggest a downward trend, the survey estimates tend to fluctuate in the ACT due to our small population. The trend in future years will be closely monitored to see if it continues downward and reaches significance.
While we have seen some improvements in these areas, we know that lifestyle risk behaviours—including smoking, drinking alcohol and illicit drug use—are responsible for a large proportion of the disease burden in the ACT. We all make choices that impact our health. However, it is important to recognise that these health behaviours do not occur in a vacuum but are influenced by a complex interplay of
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