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Health Indicators: Advances and Obstacles
>> Foreign Aid in the National Interest >> Chapter 3 >> Health Indicators: Advances and Obstacles Jump to Chapter 3 Sections:
>> Health, development and aid >> Broad progress, startling changes, persistent quandaries >> Health indicators: advances and obstacles >> Health systems and services >> To review the bidding >> Implications of trends for future directions >> Implications for the philosophy and pursuit of "foreign assistance" >> Notes >> Background paper >> References
Infectious diseases
Also requiring attention are countries primarily African still dominated by infectious diseases and projected to continue lagging behind over the next 20 years. This disparity is creating a growing divide between these and other developing countries, though within this lagging group there is wide variation. Still, among African countries identified by the World Health Organization as having very high child and adult death rates, infectious diseases account for 55 percent of deaths. Noncommunicable diseases account for just 20 percent.65 Moreover, nearly half of the world’s deaths from infectious diseases occur in Africa.
Infectious and parasitic diseases have long been a major concern of global health efforts. Humans are vulnerable to multiple types of infections (bacterial, viral, and parasitic) from multiple sources (people, vectors, water, soil) with varying epidemiological implications and effects that can change over time, especially as infectious agents mutate and develop resistance to known therapies. Thus infectious diseases involve many types of and responses to disease.
For example, ebola takes only days to kill its victims. Thus it requires a very different medical response than tuberculosis, which is both an infectious and a chronic disease. Meanwhile, preventing and managing malaria is less a matter of medicine than of environmental strategies, and so calls for yet another approach.
Moreover, infectious diseases have enormous potential to develop resistance to existing therapies or to mutate into new agents. New diseases can emerge, and super diseases can develop based on well-known infectious agents such as influenza. The probability of such change appears to be growing in line with increasing mobility, rapid pathogen resistance, and perhaps climate change. The U.S. Centers for Disease notes that as long as microbes can evolve, new diseases will appear.
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Last Updated on: January 07, 2003 |
