Projects: Medical and Health
In China, most HIV infected people are those who are already struggling against poverty: farmers, migrant workers and the unemployed. Anyone who gets infected with HIV can easily end up plunging their whole family into poverty.
In many remote Chinese villages, where health care services are few and difficult to access, and where women give birth to their children at home, often assisted by uncertified local midwives or female friends and family members, maternal mortality rates remain high.
Because very few farmers can pay for the medical services they receive, it takes too long a time for a village doctor to make enough money to build an actual clinic. Poor transportation also makes the price of construction materials several times higher than normal once the cost of actually getting them to a remote village has been factored in.
Midu County (Yunnan) has too few funds to invest into medical and health services, and medical institutions have very little capacity to develop themselves and meet farmers' needs for more accessible medical services.
Iodine deficiency can lead to brain trauma as well as poor brain development. An investigation has revealed that some areas of China are seriously short of iodine while 80% of the mental retardation in those areas is caused by iodine deficiency.
Drug trafficking makes Yunnan China's hotbed of AIDS. In Henan, countless farmers have been found to be infected with HIV through selling their blood in an attempt to reduce their poverty.
There are many villages without any clinic where people can go for timely help. Meanwhile, because of China's long feudal history, the status of rural women is often low both within their families and within wider society as a whole.
In rural areas of China, diseases, natural disasters, accidents and pesticide toxicosis cause a lot of accidental deaths, resulting in a lot of children finding themselves suddenly orphaned.
The economy in western China lags far behind that in other parts of the country. As a result, health care services in western China are scarce and of poor quality. Farmers and herdsmen, in particular the ethnic minorities living in mountains, suffer from various kinds of diseases that are already under control in more developed cities.
A summary of current medical and health projects
