Around the World Health Care and Illness

There are about 1 billion people around the world that do not have proper access to health care. These people are living way below the poverty line on less than one dollar per day. This is a problem that is widely recognized among the world’s governments and health organizations. In the 1970s the World Health Organization began and led a world-wide effort to bring about “Health for All” by the year 2000. This goal, even over 30 years later is still far from fruition.
Accounting for only about 2% of deaths in Europe infectious and parasitic diseases are however responsible for more than half of all deaths in Africa. About 2.3 million people each year, mostly in underdeveloped countries, die from eight preventable diseases each year because they were not vaccinated.
There is an additional fear that the gap between the wealthier countries and the poorest as far as health care is concerned seems to be growing. One example is the fact that the mortality rate for children five years old and under has been falling in high-income countries, and fell by 70% in the thirty years from 1970 to 2000, but the mortality rate for that same age group has only fallen by 40% in poorer countries during the same time period.