Metabolic Disease Collaboration Talked up as Top SCO Health Officials Meet in Shanghai

China will cultivate 1,000 metabolic disease medical professionals and another 500 doctors in other majors for Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states each year, local health officials announced over the weekend.

They were speaking at the academic committee meeting of the China-SCO Cooperation Center for Metabolic Diseases in Shanghai.

Some 20 delegates from SCO member countries gathered at Shanghai's Ruijin Hospital to share their experiences on metabolic disease prevention and control, get a look at China's advanced healthcare system and booming biomedical industry, and discuss plans for deeper medical collaboration.

"At the meeting, participants agreed to advance four core areas namely medical service cooperation, healthcare professional training, joint medical research and industry-academia collaboration," said Dr Ning Guang, president of Ruijin Hospital, which is the home of the China-SCO Cooperation Center for Metabolic Diseases – the first national-level SCO specialized medical platform in Shanghai.

The center, which was established in February, aims to jointly tackle metabolic disorders, whose patients within SCO member states account for half of the global patient population. Ailments like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and tumors are responsible for over 70 percent of deaths and have become the leading cause of mortality from non-communicable diseases within the SCO.

Delegates said it was a big honor to participate in the meeting and voiced strong admiration for China's healthcare achievements in the past decades.

"Metabolic disease is a very big global problem and the medical fraternity has paid a lot of attention to this field," said Zhanara Kussymzhanova, vice president of the National Hospital of the Medical Center of the Presidential Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

"I firmly believe this meeting will help us to develop a good system in Kazakhstan. We have all the resources for developing and expanding on the good experience of the Chinese side, in Kazakhstan."

Apart from talent training, officials said member states will work together to hold regular health forums, develop multilingual training materials, launch flagship SCO health science programs, issue a white paper on metabolic disease status across SCO countries and scale up successful prevention and treatment models across the region for better and new scientific cooperation.

"We aim not only to share existing best practices but also to create new ones for the world to benefit from," Ning added.