According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the three ills to life in the 21st Century are: globalization of unhealthy lifestyles, rapid unplanned urbanization, and ageing of populations. These are, purportedly, the big threats to health because these three reasons bring about the increase in chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer. While these are the top killers in the world, these illnesses are mostly for countries that do not have the tag “poor.” Because if we consider the comparatively more populous Third World, especially Africa, the top killers are malaria, diarrhea, and tuberculosis.

If WHO were to make another listing of three ills to life in the 21st century for poor nations, these would be: poor access to healthcare, gross lack of information and miseducation about health and healthcare, and the politics behind global healthcare that eventually handicaps the distribution of much-needed healthcare to the poor and marginalized.

The WHO admits that the imbalance in healthcare access is more precarious now than it was 30 years ago. So much so that “life expectancy between the world’s richest and poorest countries can vary by more than 40 years.” The area of expenditure for health is where the great divide is found. Again according to the WHO, “globally, annual government expenditure on health varies from as little as $20 per person to well over $6,000.”

The standard and ideal premium for healthcare focuses on ‘state-of-the-art technology and specialist care.’ But this is largely a view from richer countries. On the other hand, epidemiological estimates from WHO and the World Bank (WB) reveal that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world with the highest level of mortality where the top killer diseases are malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough/pertussis, African sleeping sickness or tsetse, meningitis, and tetanus.

It is very unfortunate that the guardians of world health themselves cannot level off the great health divide, even at least in the categories and estimates of top killer diseases. It is understandable that those who can afford state-of-the-art technology and specialist care are the ones who are given such, and fully-documented in the process. On the other hand, the ones who can barely have access to primary healthcare remain without access. Thus, they cannot even reach centers of healthcare in their villages and remain unrecorded and unaccounted for the estimates. No wonder heart disease is recorded as the world’s top killer disease instead of malaria.

Some questions beg to be asked. Who really makes the estimates? How are these estimates computed?� And, most importantly, who watches the watchmen?

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Via BBC