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May 30, 2007
A Helpful Reminder
Doctors Without Borders has a new report setting down in painful detail the lack of health care workers in southern Africa, and its effect on medical treatment there, especially around AIDS. The health-worker crisis is pushing its way onto the global AIDS community's radar, albeit slowly. Last year at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, protesters interrupted one of Bill Clinton's speeches to call for more doctors and nurses. Clinton said something to the effect of "Actually, I agree with them."
Now that drugs are more widely available, the barriers to access are increasingly about infrastructure and personnel. Malawi, the report says, has two doctors for every 100,000 people -- that's 260 for the entire country of 13 million.
There are a few causes here. The New York Times recently pointed out the problems with Africa's crumbling universities. Students I met in both Mozambique and Ghana were good-naturedly waiting out strikes and political strife to return to class. But Google "brain drain Africa" to see what happens when countries produce highly skilled workers like doctors. If they are trained abroad, they tend not to come back -- at least in particular in the medical fields.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at May 30, 2007 12:20 AM