Health Care in India
In the writing “India”, author Perri Klass offers a powerful argument for the economic social determinants of health and the need to help the poor, vulnerable populations of the world. In her article, she describes a situation where she was unable to diagnose a case of tuberculosis in an Indian child. As a pediatrician, her lack of exposure to third world diseases left her feeling helpless amongst the medical travails of the children of India. Klass describes scenarios where she is unable to comprehend the level of poverty, malnutrition and disease in India, and can only use the word “different” to describe it all. Klass states that “expectations are different.” In North America, “[we] expect every child to live to grow up” but in India early death is a very real possibility. The author’s narrow focus on the state of health in India, fails to address global achievements towards health equality and some of the challenges donor countries may face in their efforts to reach out.
Gupta and Guin conducted a study looking at the current burden of disease in the South-East Asia Region of the World Health Organization and looked at whether the current levels and trends in funding are enough to meet the needs of control, prevention and treatment. The study revealed that global levels of health aid are clearly rising. In some cases, funding for HIV/AIDS was higher than average, because of overseas awareness and mass media campaigns that have brought the disease into the spotlight. Other diseases such as malaria, which are a huge part of India’s disease burden, have not typically received as much attention from donors (Piva and Dodd, 2009). Gupta and Guin suggested that global health and development initiatives need to expand their focus to include diseases and conditions that are less well known or less discussed, while at the same time addressing social and economic limitations in each country.
In a struggle to eliminate...