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Health Research for the Millennium Development Goals
Peterson Stearns, Beverly
Peterson Stearns, Beverly
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s14835e.pdf
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Abstract
"The global health research gap has widened into a chasm, separating developed countries, with most of the resources, from developing nations, which increasingly carry the burdens of both infectious and chronic diseases. Very many participants at the 2004 annual meeting of the Global Forum for Health Research, Forum 8, in Mexico City said bluntly they believed it was highly unlikely that half of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), those specifi cally dealing with health, would be achieved by the target date of 2015. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, stated in an editorial before the conference that the MDG deadline “looks ludicrously optimistic.” Several speakers attributed the failure to meet the MDGs to a lack of political will to deal with the world’s health problems and to the profound poverty and inequities that are compounded by disease. Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, addressing participants at the joint opening of Forum 8 and the Ministerial Summit on Health Research, phrased it a little differently, saying that today’s globalization means there must be a “collective will” to face the challenges. Health, he added, is a social asset that should be within the reach of all, not a privilege. He pointed to Mexico, which is one of the few low- and middle-income countries to devote 2% of its health budget to research, and predicted that his country would meet some of the MDGs by 2006 and the remainder by 2010. For most developing countries, however, the future is not so bright. The health research gap mirrors widening disparities in health between the rich and poor, the developed and developing countries. While the average life expectancy in high-income countries now exceeds 78 years, a child born today in one of the least developed countries can barely expect to reach 50. The health systems themselves are inequitable, delivering more and higher quality services to the well off than to the poor."(pg5)
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Conference proceedings
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2005-04
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2940286310
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With permission of the license/copyright holder