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Official Says West China Sees Increasing Public Health Emergencies

Posted on: Monday, 2 January 2006, 09:00 CST

Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)

Nanning, 2 January: A local health official has called for a sound mechanism to deal with public health emergencies in western China, saying the western region is witnessing growing number of such cases due to the poor medical infrastructure in the vast rural areas.

Statistics from China's Ministry of Health show that the 12 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in west China reported 782 cases of public health emergencies in 2004, which involved 40,828 people and claimed the life of 273 of them.

The figures accounted for 49 per cent, 52.7 per cent and 65.3 per cent of the national total respectively, said Tan Mingjie, vice- director of the health department of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, south China.

This is mainly attributable to the failure of some local governments to realize the importance of medical infrastructure construction and promote publicity about health care, to the poor knowledge about health among rural residents, and to the poor capacity of local grassroots medical institutions for disease prevention, control and treatment, he said.

"It is a pressing job to establish or improve local mechanisms to cope with pubic health emergencies in west China," Tan said.

In Guangxi, he said, the regional government has established three networks to cope with public health emergencies, collect related information and provide emergency aid.

The networks were proved to be effective in the fight against major public health cases such as SARS, the official said.

Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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