Aug 19, 2010

Scientific American | Fighting Disease and Health System Strengthening—an Either, Or?

“Are global disease campaigns worsening basic medical care in poor countries?” asks Scientific American’s Katherine Harmon in her analysis of a recently published study, which suggests that efforts to ramp up curative care for certain diseases can also detract from health workers’ (and systems’) overall capacity to attend to other critical health conditions, or to provide basic preventative care, in understaffed and low resource regions of the world.

One anecdote drawn from the study describes how, at a health center in Mali, where there was an influx of supplies and training to treat five common tropical diseases, researches noticed that although “training for the disease-centered programs helped staff improve delivery of the specific drugs,” there were “many ‘missed opportunities for curative care,’ such as sick or injured children who lined up for the targeted drug distribution but who were not given the care they needed for other conditions.”

Read: Are global disease campaigns worsening basic medical care in poor countries?, Scientific American, August 18, 2010

Reference: Interactions between Global Health Initiatives and Country Health Systems: The Case of a Neglected Tropical Diseases Control Program in Mali, PloS Medicine, August 17, 2010

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