PAHO launches special issue on strengthening primary care to combat NCDs across Americas

A scientific journal published by the Pan American Health Organization has released a special issue focused on a crisis that kills millions across the Western Hemisphere each year: noncommunicable diseases. These are the conditions that dominate the landscape of modern illness—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease—and they account for six million deaths annually in the Americas. What makes this toll particularly stark is that nearly four in ten of those deaths occur prematurely, striking people before they reach seventy.

The scale of ongoing suffering is equally staggering. More than 250 million people in the region are currently living with at least one chronic disease, managing conditions that require sustained medical attention and lifestyle adjustment. Yet the evidence suggests something hopeful: many of these deaths and much of this suffering could be prevented or delayed through better access to primary care—the foundational health services that most people encounter first when they seek medical help.

The special issue, supported by funding from Denmark through the World Health Organization, brings together research and field experience from six countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago. The articles document what health ministries, universities, civil society groups, and PAHO itself have learned from trying to improve how primary care clinics screen for, diagnose, treat, and manage chronic diseases. The work is granular and practical: implementing clinical guidelines that actually work in real settings, designing care systems that coordinate treatment across multiple providers, and understanding how poverty and social conditions affect whether patients can follow medical advice.

At the center of these efforts sits PAHO's Better Care for NCDs initiative, which includes a program called HEARTS focused specifically on controlling high blood pressure and other cardiovascular risk factors. The research shows that this approach—investing in primary care infrastructure and training—is not only feasible and necessary but also cost-effective. In other words, it saves money while saving lives.

The timing matters. The United Nations has set a target to reduce premature deaths from noncommunicable diseases by one-third by 2030. That deadline is less than four years away. The articles in this special issue argue that strengthening primary care is essential to hitting that goal. They also emphasize something often overlooked in medical literature: the importance of treating people and communities as partners in their own care, not passive recipients of treatment. The research spans multiple languages—Spanish, English, and Portuguese—reflecting the diversity of the region and the collaborative nature of the work.

What emerges from this collection is a portrait of a region grappling with a preventable crisis. The diseases are not new. The solutions are not mysterious. What is required is sustained investment in the basic infrastructure of health care—the clinics, the training, the systems—that allow people to catch disease early and manage it well. The special issue documents both the progress made and the distance still to travel.