AIDS fight ‘is failing’

GLOBAL efforts to fight HIV/AIDS and other diseases and reduce the number of women who die in childbirth will founder unless the international community boosts basic medical care in poor countries, the World Health Organisation said yesterday.

Campaigns against individual diseases are essential, but policy-makers must also focus on overall health services because neglecting them increases the risk that epidemics will spread across national borders, the UN health agency said in its annual report.

AIDS kills 5,000 adults and 1,000 children every day in Africa.

The disease has put medical services under such pressure that they have trouble coping with a host of other diseases, widening the health divide between rich and poor nations, the WHO said. “These global health gaps are unacceptable,” WHO chief Dr Lee Jong-wook said in Geneva.

The report said donors could counter some of the weaknesses by funding more training for health workers, while governments should boost partnerships between health officials and affected communities.

The gap between industrialised and developing countries is also stark in the statistics on maternal mortality, said WHO. The risk for women of dying in childbirth is 250 times higher in poor countries than in rich ones.

More than 500,000 women die each year as a result of complications during pregnancy.