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Blood pressure toll

Washington: The numbers are a shock: almost a billion people worldwide have high blood pressure, and more than half a billion more will face this silent killer by 2025.

It is not just a problem for the ever-fattening Western world, either. Even in parts of Africa, high blood pressure is becoming common.

That translates into millions of deaths from heart disease alone. Yet hypertension does not command the attention of, say, bird flu, which so far has killed fewer than 200 people.

"Hypertension has gone a bit out of fashion," says Dr. Jan Ostergren of Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital, who co-authored a first-of-its-kind analysis of the global impact of high blood pressure.

The idea is to rev up world governments to fight bad blood pressure just as countries have banded together in the past to fight diseases. — AP

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