Health: The Big Picture

Everyone knows what it’s like to be sick—you feel down, you cough, you sniffle, it’s hard to sleep and sometimes you don’t have the energy to do much at all—and that’s just with a cold! Imagine if you felt that way or worse all the time. It would be difficult to go to school and learn.

In the developing world, many kids are going to school sick, or are too sick to go to school at all. And they don’t have colds or the flu: they have serious illnesses that threaten their lives.

They have serious illnesses that threaten their lives.

Keeping people healthy means making sure they have the knowledge to prevent disease, the option to see a doctor and the ability to access life-saving medicine when they need it. In this way, children get the head start they need to do well.

But many people around the world don’t have the opportunity to be healthy. Half the children who die before the age of five are killed by one of five diseases: HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, malaria, measles and pneumonia. These are all preventable and treatable. Mothers also need better care, since almost half a million women die each year during childbirth.

Improving Health: We Can Do it Together

In the developed world, we have clean water, nutritious food and medicine when we are sick. If we get an upset stomach, it isn’t a big deal. But for a child in a country like Kenya, an upset stomach can lead to diarrhea, which is potentially life threatening.

Traveling Health Clinic helps Kenyans living in poverty stay healthy, but lots of people around the world don’t have these chances.

We have access to technology and medicines that could literally save thousands of lives every day. As people who care about creating a better world, it’s our job to help improve health around the world. With your help, a child’s stomach ache can be just a stomach ache, no matter what part of the world they live in.

This traveling health clinic helps Kenyans living in poverty stay healthy.

Improving health in the developing world is an important step toward helping people break out of the cycle of poverty. Healthy people—especially women and children who are at the greatest risk for disease—are empowered. They become productive and can envision and create a hopeful future for their communities.

Health and the Millennium Development Goals: Targets We Can Meet

There are two Millennium Development Goals that relate to health. These goals demand attention to the major health epidemics—like AIDS—that are getting worse and worse around the world. A specific focus is given to women’s health issues, which are often ignored. These goals show that preventable health problems—like complications during pregnancy or water-borne diseases—are keeping millions of people in poverty and killing millions more.

The two Millennium Development Goals that relate to health are:

Goal: Improve Maternal Health

What We Need To Do

Improve maternal health by reducing the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015.

The Challenge

• Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death and disability among women of reproductive age in developing countries.
• An estimated 529,000 women died from complications of pregnancy and childbirth in 2000; for every woman who died, 20 more were seriously injured or disabled.

Goal: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Other Diseases

What We Need To Do

Stop and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, including tuberculosis.

The Challenge

• At the end of 2006, 39.5 million people were living with HIV, the highest number of people on record. 2.3 million of these people are children.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 64 percent all people living with HIV.

Causes: Why Are So Many People Sick?

Root Causes for Health Issues in the Developing World:

Knowledge = Prevention

Many people don’t know how to protect themselves from diseases like HIV/AIDS, and they can’t ask because it isn’t okay to talk about the disease in their communities.

Hunger

It’s much harder for someone to stay healthy when they aren’t eating enough nutritious food. They have low energy, get sick easily and have trouble getting healthy again.

Water

Diarrheal diseases, like cholera, are carried by dirty water and are spread when people living in poverty have to drink this water because they have no other choice. Almost two million people die from these diseases each year.

These are a few of the root causes of health issues that are problems all over the world, but there are many circumstances that affect individuals or specific regions. For example, in South Asia, some people are sick because of pollution that contaminates drinking water.

North America: In a Position to Help

People in the developed world are much healthier than people in developing countries. Mostly, this poor health is caused by issues of poverty and education. Our governments spend far more money than developing countries on preventing sickness and treating people who are already sick. We also benefit from public health campaigns and health education—like phys-ed class in school—that teach us how to be our healthiest.

Sierra Leone spends $34 per person on health care each year.

In other parts of the world, this isn’t the case. The United States spends $5,711 per person on health care each year, Switzerland spends $4,111 and Japan spends $2, 293. That’s a massive difference from Sierra Leone.

We have the financial resources to help people in developing countries be healthier. Through development projects like clean water wells, traveling health clinics and special care for pregnant women, we can make a big difference.

Global Status: Where the World is Now

Major health problems like HIV/AIDS, pneumonia or complications during childbirth happen all over the world. The difference is in the scale of these problems.

In East Asia, pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in young children and infants. In wealthier regions with adequate health care, it’s very serious if a young child gets pneumonia, but it doesn’t happen very often and those who are sick with the illness usually survive.

In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS is an epidemic, which means it’s spreading at a rate that’s out of control. In North America, the disease is a serious problem, but on a much smaller scale. Many North Americans who do have HIV/AIDS can access life-saving drugs that can help them live for decades, but almost no one in sub-Saharan Africa can afford this medicine.

In the developing world, poor health is the norm and good health is unusual.

Global Health Status:

• Every year, more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth—this is almost one death every minute of every day.
• Every day, 8,000 people die of AIDS-related conditions. This is equal to about three million deaths per year.
• Sub-Saharan Africa has just over 10 percent of the world’s population, but it is home to 64 percent of the global total of people living with HIV and 90 percent of children (under 15) living with the virus.
• Malaria acutely infects almost 300 million people each year and kills more than one million annually, with almost 90 percent of all cases in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Every year, 8.8 million people become newly infected with tuberculosis (TB). Every day, 5,500 die from it—that’s one million deaths worldwide each year.

A Story You Should Hear about Health

Take Action for Health

There are lots of actions you can take to help improve health in the developing world. Try these as a start.