CONNECTIONS WITHIN PARAGRAPHS.
1. To what can we attribute this encouraging development? One factor is people’s willingness to make lifestyle changes in order to reduce their risk of CVD. A second factor is the recent advances that have considerably improved thee diagnosis and treatment of CVD.
2. It attracts financial resources away from the prevention programs that according to experts are urgently needed. It is also a factor in the increasing costs of health care. To recover the enormous costs of the necessary expertise and equipment, hospitals raise their charges for all patients.
3. In 2000, for example, French doctors reported success with procedure in which they introduced a normally functioning gene into three babies who suffered fatal immune deficiency. In the same year, other tams of researchers reported the encouraging results of gene therapy in patients who were suffering from hemophilia and skin cancer. Ten months later, the children’s immune systems appeared normally, evidence that h normal gene had taken over the world of the defective one.
4. The main obstacle is people’s reluctance to speak openly about the ways HIV/AIDS is most often transmitted- through unprotected sex and through contaminated needles in illegal drug use. For example, in spit of evidence that the disease was spreading rapidily, the White House did not allow its own surgeon general to make public statements about AIDS for four years. This reluctance can frequently be seen in the early responses of government to the growing threat of AIDS.
5. Because many low-income Americans cannot afford annual physical examinations, they tend to be diagnosed with serious diseases late, when survival rate is lower. For the same reason, their children frequently do not complete their programs of vaccination. Both these problems would be helped by more emphasis on PHC, which provides patients with easy access to regular assessments of their health needs.