UNITED NATIONS Agency: Medical care in poor countries is priority

Around 30 million people in Africa have HIV or AIDS.
GENEVA (AP) -- The fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases and efforts to reduce the number of women who die in childbirth will founder unless the international community boosts basic medical care in poor countries, the U.N. health agency said today.
Campaigns against individual diseases are essential, but policy-makers also must focus on overall health services because neglecting them increases the risk that epidemics will spread across borders, the World Health Organization said in its annual report.
AIDS kills 5,000 adults and 1,000 children every day in Africa. Life expectancy there has plunged as much as 20 years because of the disease.
Medical services are under such pressure from AIDS that they have trouble coping with a host of other diseases, widening the health divide between rich and poor nations, according to the WHO.
'Unacceptable'
"These global health gaps are unacceptable," WHO chief Dr. Lee Jong-wook said in his introduction to the 193-page World Health Report.
Global efforts -- like a WHO-spearheaded program to increase access to anti-HIV drugs -- face "obstacles that have slowed and in some cases reversed progress toward meeting the health needs of all people," Lee said.
"Effective action to improve population health is possible in every country but it takes local knowledge and strength and sustained international support to turn that possibility into reality," Lee said. "This means working with countries -- especially those most in need -- not only to confront health crises, but to construct sustainable and equitable health systems."
The report said donors can counter some of the weaknesses by funding more training for health workers, while governments should boost partnerships between health officials and affected communities.
The urgency of the challenge is illustrated by the contrasting pros-pects of baby girls born at the same moment in Japan and Sierra Leone, said the report. While the Japanese baby can expect to live for about 85 years, life expectancy for the child in one of Africa's poorest countries is just 36 years.
The Japanese girl will likely receive some of the best health care in the world whenever she needs it, but the girl in Sierra Leone may never see a doctor or nurse.
Around 30 million people in African nations are infected with HIV/AIDS, about 70 percent of all cases in the world. But even without the impact of the disease, WHO said, millions of children born in Africa and other poor regions are at greater risk of dying before their fifth birthday than they were a decade ago.
Child killers
In developing countries, infectious diseases represent seven out of the 10 major causes of child deaths. Some of the leading child killers in 2002 were respiratory infections, which caused 1.9 million deaths. Diarrhea killed 1.6 million and malaria 1.1 million.
The gap between industrialized and developing countries is also stark in the statistics on maternal mortality, said WHO. The risk for women of dying in childbirth is 250 times higher in poor countries than in rich ones. More than 500,000 women die each year as a result of complications during pregnancy.
Of the 45 million deaths among adults worldwide in 2002, almost three-quarters were caused by non-communicable diseases. These are the main cause of death in all regions except Africa, where HIV/AIDS has become the leading cause of mortality among adults aged 15-59 years.