Sixty percent of China's 1,832 counties have signed
up to a health education initiative for rural populations, Deputy
Health Minister Gao Qiang said in Beijing on Wednesday.
Gao made the announcement at a seminar on the
National Health Promotion Project for Chinese Farmers. The project
aims to universalize health education amongst the country's 900
million rural people who often lack access to information on basic
hygiene and other issues.
Statistics show that more than 80 percent of
China's infectious diseases occur in rural areas. Absence of
medical services is one reason, but another is ignorance of how to
maintain basic, daily hygiene.
According to a Ministry of Health survey from 2000,
only 36 percent of rural people over fifteen years old had a good
grounding in the importance of clean water, a sanitary environment
and prevention of diseases.
The initiative plans to set up classes in 90, 80
and 70 percent of elementary and middle schools in eastern, central
and western provinces respectively. It will also enable 90, 70 and
50 percent of the three provinces' village clinics to run
health-consulting services.
Largely media-based, the program has produced 24 TV
and 30 radio programs to be broadcast in over 2,000 rural counties.
It has also published several books on health and hygiene written
in simple language and dotted with illustrations.
China has lacked a functioning rural medical
service network since the cooperation system, a collective
mechanism offering cheap medical services, collapsed in 1980s.
There are 1.2 million junior medical staff in rural
clinics, who, according to Gao, are "almost incapable of curing
diseases" for lack of professional training.
In addition, rural areas lack a sanitation
infrastructure, which makes them vulnerable to infectious
diseases.
"Many diseases could be prevented with basic
hygiene knowledge. We are trying to enable them to help
themselves," said Gao.
(Xinhua News Agency November 11, 2004)