The better living conditions in China are reflected in a change in major health problems: Today cancers, cerebrovascular diseases and heart disease have become the top three health-related killers of China's approximately 450 million urban residents — replacing respiratory system diseases, infectious diseases and tuberculosis that were prevalent in the 1950s.People are living longer: The average life expectancy of the Chinese people reached 71.8 years old, five years more than the international level. And on the other end of the spectrum — China's mortality rate for infants and for children under five years of age has fallen from 50.2 and 61 per thousand respectively in 1990 to 32.2 and 39.7 per thousand in 2000.
In Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and other large cities, various high-level specialized hospitals of tumor, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, ophthalmological and dental diseases, traditional Chinese medicine and infectious diseases can be found, in addition to a large number of general hospitals. Medium-sized cities in all the provinces and autonomous regions have general and specialized hospitals equipped with modern facilities. Now medical, prevention, and health-care networks at the county, township and village levels have taken shape in the countryside. In 2002, China had 290,000 medical, health-care and epidemic institutions, with
3.21 million beds, and 4.44 million medical personnel. At present, there are more than 2,000 hospitals at the county level, and more than 48,000 hospitals at the township and town levels. Of the
730,000 administrative villages, 89.8 percent have medical centers. China has a total of 1.29 million rural doctors and paramedics.
A sedentary lifestyle, excessive fat- and salt-rich food intake, and growing psychological pressures associated with better living conditions have made Chinese increasingly vulnerable to such problems commonly seen in the West as high blood pressure and mental depression. More than 100 million Chinese, or about one in every 13 people in China, are estimated to have high blood pressure. About 240 million Chinese over the age of 20 are overweight, and more than 30 million of them are obese according to international standards.Particularly disturbing — in a country where mental illness traditionally has been considered something shameful — was the release in 2002 of a study showing that suicide in China had developed into the leading cause of death among young people, those between 15 and 34 years of age. China's first suicide-prevention organization — the Beijing Psychological Crisis Research and InterventionCenter — opened to the public in November 2002."Prevention first" is an important principle in all of China's health care work, and the National Physical Fitness Program, for instance, also provides guidance to help citizens tackle new health problems. (See "Recreation and Physical Fitness" under Sports Chapter.)
Government health departments also have worked hard to prevent and control infectious, endemic and parasitic diseases. Among the HIV/AIDS victims in China, the largest group, making up 53.6 per - cent of the total, are between the ages of 20 and 29. The second largest group is between the ages of 30 and 39. Male patients make up more than 80 percent of the total. The State Council has issued a 10-year plan for HIV/AIDS control from 2001 to 2010, that includes a series of prevention measures such as ensuring the safety of medical blood supplies, and fighting drug use and prostitution. The Central Government in 2002 planned to invest 2 billion yuan (US$240 million) to improve the condition of blood stations. Administrative areas at all levels have formed a national health care anti-epidemic network with anti-epidemic stations and other prevention institutions as the mainstay. In the early 1960s, China had already eliminated smallpox, more than 10 years earlier than in the world as a whole. To focus on eliminating or controlling infectious and local diseases, the Chinese government enacted a number of measures including the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases, the National Action Plan for Eliminating Poliomyelitis in 1995, and the China Outline of the Program for Eliminating Iodine Deficiency Diseases in 2000.These efforts have been recognized with a special achievement prize awarded the Department of Disease Control of the Ministry of Health by the World Health Organization, of which China is a member nation. In recent years, community health service networks have expanded to include most large and medium-sized cities, and are popular among citizens. These services are geared to accommodate at the grass-roots level problems involved with increased urbanization and contemporary social problems such as an aging population.
Combating SARS
In the first half of 2003, an infectious disease, atypical pneumonia or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), spread in some of the countries and regions in the world, with China having the largest number of SARS patients. As this was a new kind of infectious disease not yet fully understood by mankind, the Chinese government encountered great difficulty in its prevention and control in the early stage of the epidemic breakout. But then the Chinese government promptly and resolutely adopted a whole array of measures to check the spread of the disease, including the establishment of a national command headquarters for SARS prevention and control, and demanded that governments at all levels put the control of the epidemic spread as the number one task on their current agendas. By now the epidemic has been basically taken in hand. Currently, the Chinese government and the people nationwide are making sustained efforts in order to achieve across-the-board victory in SARS prevention and control.
