A five-day African health conference ended in Johannesburg on Friday with the continent’s health ministers promising to step up the fight against Aids, malaria and tuberculosis and to bring poverty and malnutrition under control.
South Africa’s Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, speaking at the end of the meeting of the United Nations World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Africa region, said the ministers has resolved to allocate more of their national resources to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
”We resolved to scale up our interventions on HIV and Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, through, among others, allocating increased national resources for activities to fight these diseases, promoting research on traditional medicines and making drugs, diagnostic tools and other commodities accessible and affordable,” she said.
Tshabalala-Msimang said the ministers needed to lobby for nutritional support for people with chronic diseases and to intensify their efforts to alleviate poverty.
”The meeting discussed the need to address the conditions of poverty and malnutrition that make our populations more vulnerable to HIV infections and succumb to Aids and tuberculosis.
”Food insecurity, malnutrition and underdevelopment remain a priority for us on this continent.”
Africa is the continent worst affected by Aids, with close to 30-million infected people and an estimated three million Aids deaths in 2002.
According to the WHO, 10-million children in low- and middle-income countries die every year before reaching the age of five.
Seven million of those deaths are from five preventable and treatable conditions — pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and malnutrition.
About 270-million cases of acute malaria occur annually in Africa, with more than 900 000 deaths, causing an annual economic loss of $12-billion.
”Over 450-million poor Africans lack access to safe water, 490-million are without adequate sanitation and one out of every five children dies from a communicable disease linked to environmental conditions,” the report states.
”Poverty is also the main cause of food insecurity and consumption of unsafe food. Together, these factors contribute to the complex natural and human-made emergencies occurring on a large scale in the region.”
The meeting adopted six resolutions on Friday — to strengthen health economics and investment, to develop hospitals in Africa, work towards preventing violence and road accidents, to promote access by all women to information and health facilities, to develop and update food safety policies and to scale up Aids, malaria and tuberculosis interventions.
The conference started on Monday with WHO Director General Jong-Wook Lee telling delegates that a human resource crisis in Africa’s overburdened health system was jeopardising a plan to treat the continent’s Aids sufferers.
”Health systems depend most of all on skilled and dedicated personnel, and here we face big challenges, particularly in this region which, on top of everything else, suffers heavy losses to the brain drain,” he said.
Habib Doutoum, interim social affairs commissioner of the African Union, said countries to which health professionals moved from poorer states should provide some compensation for the loss of staff.
At present, there were only 16 doctors per 100 000 of the continent’s population, he said.
”Africa’s trained health professionals have become a free commodity for developed countries,” Doutoum said.
The conference heard that Africa would make far more progress in fighting Aids if the Western world reacted as it did to the recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars).
Zambia’s Health Minister Brian Chituwo said on Thursday that Sars was a wake-up call for Africa’s health systems.
”How I wish the world would respond to HIV/Aids in a similar manner,” he said. — Sapa-AFP