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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 30 luglio 2010 alle ore 09:14.
NEW YORK ‧‧– Every country, rich and poor, should ensure universal coverage of primary health care, including safe childbirth, nutrition, vaccines, malaria control, and clinical services. Each year, nearly nine million children die of conditions that could be prevented or treated, and nearly 400,000 women die because of complications during pregnancy.
Almost all of these deaths are in the world’s poorest countries. Ending these deaths would not only reduce suffering, but would also unleash economic prosperity in impoverished and unstable societies.
The greatest barrier to doing so is that the poorest countries can’t afford universal primary health care, even though the cost per person is very low. Using immunizations, modern medicines, state-of-the-art diagnostics, mobile phones, and other new technologies, universal primary health care is now highly effective and very inexpensive, costing around $54 per person per year in the poorest countries.
Yet, because of their very low incomes, the poorest countries can afford only around $14 per person from their national budgets. Financial help from abroad is needed to cover roughly $40 per person per year. With approximately one billion impoverished people still lacking primary health care, the total sum needed is around $40 billion per year. Foreign donors – including the United States, the European Union, and Japan – are currently contributing around one-third of that, roughly $14 billion per year.
The remaining annual financial gap is therefore about $26 billion. With that money, the lives of many millions of mothers and children would be saved each year.
This is not a lot of money for the rich countries, but they fail to come up with it. The most obvious gap is in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a global initiative to help the poorest countries fight these killer diseases. The Global Fund is desperately short of money, yet the Obama administration and other governments are not responding to the financial need.
The rich countries could easily come up with the money. First, the US could end its expensive and failed war in Afghanistan, which is costing around $100 billion per year. If the US gave a tiny fraction of that $100 billion in development aid for Afghanistan, it would be far more successful in achieving peace and stability in that war-ravaged country.