At the launch of the Global Wellness Summit (GWS) at The Breakers Palm Beach on Monday, October 9, a call to action was made: eradicate chronic, preventable disease.
The opening of the summit noted that roughly 70 percent of all deaths each year are a result of preventable diseases, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Additionally, the cost of largely preventable chronic disease could reach $47 trillion by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum. So, as the summit kicked off the three-day event, the health and wellness industries were asked to help make preventable diseases a thing of the past.
“The time has come to pool our resources – knowledge, access, funding – and use our collective megaphone on the world stage to work towards achieving a wold free of preventable diseases” says Susie Ellis, chairman and CEO of the non-profit Global Wellness Institute (GWI), the hosts of the GWS. “Unlike President Kennedy’s famous moonshot to send a man to the moon, where it was clear when the ‘mission was accomplished’ – this moonshot will require not one, but many incremental steps for mankind.”
Health and wellness leaders who attended the ceremony united behind the first global commitment to achieve a world free of preventable disease, a moonshot that is arguably as urgent as it is massive in scale.
Joining Ellis was Richard H. Carmona, M.D., the 17th Surgeon General of the United States and the current chief of health innovation for Canyon Ranch, as the two announced the ‘“wellness moonshot” to over 600 very receptive delegates representing health and wellness across a number of sectors, including fitness, mental wellness, mind-body, nutrition, workplace wellness, technology, complementary medicine, architecture and real estate, and spa and tourism.
“The world is increasingly plagued by largely preventable chronic diseases, and the crippling economic burden that comes with them,” Carmona says. “This call to action is absolutely critical, refocusing on humankind’s most pressing need. The GWI is the right organization to launch this moonshot, as it can only be achieved with high-level collaboration in the many health and wellness sectors.”
GWI plans on bringing the issue of preventable disease to the forefront in its research and education efforts as well as in its commitment to forge even more collaborations to create new plans of action. The organization’s initial focus will be on informative campaigns to raise attention of the Wellness Moonshot, from which resources for change would be provided and prevention initiatives and high-impact global projects would be created. Ellis also noted that GWI would catalyze stakeholders from both the private and public sectors to coordinate, collaborate, and commit to the Wellness Moonshot.
American Spa was at the launch of the Wellness Moonshot earlier this week. Check out the clip below for a taste of what we saw.
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