Today the largest health concerns globally stem from from five issues: lack of clean water, insufficient of food, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, malaria and tuberculosis.
Today the largest health concerns globally stem from from five issues: lack of clean water, insufficient of food, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, malaria and tuberculosis.
Clean Water:
1 Billion People Have No Access to Clean Drinking Water — 1 out of 6 people in this world live without access to clean drinking water. 80% of all diseases like diarrhea, typhoid and parasites are linked to lack of clean drinking water. Lack of clean water has killed more people that war. It’s such a simple problem and it can be a simple solution.
Food Insecurity:
The global food security crisis endangers the lives of millions of people, particularly the world’s poorest who live in countries already suffering from acute and chronic malnutrition. Multiple factors are behind the crisis, including: rapidly increasing energy prices; lack of agricultural sector investment; rapidly rising demand for food arising from economic growth and higher incomes; trade distorting subsidies; recurrent bad weather and environmental degradation; subsidized production of bio-fuels that substitute food production; imposition of export restrictions leading to hoarding and panic buying
HIV/AIDS:
It is estimated that 33 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, 95 percent of whom live in developing countries. In 2007, approximately 2.5 million people were newly infected with the virus. HIV/AIDS has killed more than 25 million people worldwide. More than two million people died of AIDS-related causes in 2007. AIDS is the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa and the fourth-leading cause of death worldwide.
The Global Malaria Epidemic:
Malaria, one of the world’s most common and serious tropical diseases, is a protozoal infection transmitted from human to human by mosquitoes. Each year, malaria causes nearly one million deaths, mostly among children under 5 years of age, and an additional 189 to 327 million clinical cases, the majority of which occur in the world’s poorest countries. Almost half the world’s population, that is 3.3 billion people, is at risk for malaria.
The Global Tuberculosis Epidemic:
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB). It affects mainly the lungs, but also can affect any other organ in the body. More than 2 billion people, one-third of the world’s population, are infected with TB bacilli, over 90 percent of them in developing countries. Globally, 9.2 million new cases and 1.7 million deaths from TB occurred in 2006. Due to a combination of economic decline, the breakdown of health systems, insufficient application of TB control measures, the spread of HIV/AIDS and the emergence of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), TB is not declining in many developing and transitional economies.