Disparities in Global Health Care Between Poor and Wealthy Nations

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Despite phenomenal improvement in global health care during the last three decade, there is still strong sign that a great disparities exist between poor and wealthy nations. Whereby cases such women are dying of post-partum haemorrhage, children dying of preventable illness such as pneumonia and diarrhoea or someone stepping on land mine in old war zones indicates the harsh reality that less fortunate people have to deal with. Obviously there is no biological reason why a person born in Mozambique should have a shorter life expectancy than a person born in America. Sure, there will always be economic and social difference within countries, but they shouldn't cause disease and suffering at a large-scale. That is completely unnecessary. That is health inequity.

The question is why has it got to such a level when the world has enough wealth and knowledge to help fix most of these problems, or at least improve the condition? Well, this is largely due to the complexity in the chains of causation in each case. The combination of unfair economics and bad politics are major roadblocks in the pursuit for greater health equality.

Economic is closely linked to health. An important underlying cause of the current health inequality is poverty. It limits access to basic resources such as sanitation, clean water and food. This often leads to infection with diseases or malnutrition, causing diarrhoea and other illnesses. Furthermore, some diseases are not only the result of poverty, but have been contributed to poverty. Better health enables more people to take part in the labour force, increase productivity and could add billions of dollars to the economy. On the other hand if majority of the population is experiencing health problem than it ...

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...ice and research which resulted in increase life expectancy plus decrease child mortality. This shows the fact that we know how to do it and now the challenge is to spread those approach more equably and more importantly make it a responsibility on the global community to decide it is a priority.

The analysis on two contributing factors of the inequalities in health among countries presents the fact that those whose lives are cut short by unequal economic and political conditions are subject to a brutal inequality. It is clear that the wide inequalities in health among nations pose real challenges. Multi-disciplinary approaches is required to tackle the difficult task of disentangle the intertwine chains of causation involved. This will involve a joint effort by economist, epidemiologists, politicians, medical scientists and many others to reduce the inequality.

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