EUROPE/ITALY - Test for Health Systems: what can be done to win the challenge to guarantee everyone’s right to health?

Thursday, 6 May 2004

Rome (Fides Service) - Differences in health in rich countries and poor countries, are growing as statistics reveal with regard to health, infant mortality rate, infant life expectancy.
For Dr Stefano Santini who works in Kampala, Uganda, “medical care in Africa is a luxury restricted to a privileged few: everywhere health-care must be paid for and for most people qualified treatment is inaccessible. Today in Africa unless you have money you cannot be treated or if you do receive treatment it will be very poor: if you are seriously ill you will run into dept to pay for treatment: you will have to sell your capital, your animal, your piece of land; you will have to give up sending your children to school. Never before in the history of medicine has such a large part of humanity been excluded from treatment and care essential for life ”.
What can be done to win the challenge of respecting everyone’s right to health? What experiences of success can show the way? What problems remain to be solved?
These are the questions which will be asked on 8 May at a debate on the right to health in developing countries organised by CUAAM association of Doctors with Africa.
Why must a child in Uganda, pay one dollar for treatment for a bout of malaria in Kalongo or Matany and 20 times more at Rubaga? This is the unfair fees system which forces patients to pay the cost of service and it proportionally higher for the poor and does not protect the sick.
To bring medical assistance to Africa means to deal with curable diseases such as malaria, TB, chicken pox, diarrhoea, respiratory infections which for lack of prevention, assistance and medicines can be mortal. (AP) (6/5/2004 Agenzia Fides; Righe:26; Parole:314)


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