India Victomized by Health Disparities Created by Their Government

The entrance to Wockhardt hospital in Bangalore, India

There was an article posted by the New York Times in 2008 about contrasting two different hospitals in  Bangalore, India.  Wockhardt is a state-of-the-art private hospital that provides 5-Star service. Patients have private rooms overlooking gardens, cable TV, computers, and ice cream in a mini fridge at easy reach.  The next hospital is Bowring, the government run hospital.  This hospital lacks dialysis machines, ventilators, an ICU, and nutritional meals.

In the article Bowring hospital says, “one of the young doctors, named Harish, said a ventilator and a dialysis machine would have allowed him to keep half of his patients alive. The most severe case, Mohammed Amin, was breathing with the aid of a hand pump that his wife squeezed silently.

Harish sent the relative of one man to get blood tests done at the nearest private hospital; there was no equipment to do the test here.”

These health disparities are caused by a government unwilling to spend money on improving their medical systems and many people unable to afford the care of a private hospital.  The government has more money to give to its government hospitals but they  refuse because there are private hospitals and feel that they are able to allocate their budget else were.  This creates even larger problems because the poor majority are unable to afford the care that they need.

A Land of Garbage in the Philippines

A garbage dump in Manila with scavengers at work

The slum of Bagong Silangan in Quezon City, Manila, is centered around a vast garbage tip on which many of the residents survive through scavenging.  In this particular slum men, women and children are knee deep in slime every day looking for articles which they can sell for their recycling value. They inhabit miserable makeshift huts on the perimeter of the dump and scavenge the dump as almost a career since they have no money.  Not only do these people not have access to health care because of their poverty, but they live in a very unhealthy environment because there are no laws to protect their health.

A young child working in a dump in Tondo

To paint a better picture, the dumps in the Philippines are huge mountains of garbage some even piled as high as seven stories.  The scavengers are mostly women and children, many without shoes, walking in the trash to find things to sell.  Many of them have bare feet that are just waiting to be protruded with broken glass, rusty nails, used syringes, and anything else that gets thrown away.  In Tondo, Philippines Adults carry bags of trash into an abandoned warehouse. They sift through the garbage for food or recyclables, leaving the leftovers of others’ leftovers to rot while flies swarm, rats scurry about and their children play nearby.

The slums of the Philippines are some of the worst in the world and many things can and need to be done in order to protect the health of all of the individuals living in the slums consumed with garbage dumps.  There are some church groups that allow Filipino women to use their kitchens in order to make things to sell, which replaces the need to scavenge. Also, some church groups provide free clinics once a year in order to improve the health of the slum residents, but large efforts need occur in order to make a significant impact on health improvement which are not in place.

Tondo Slum, residents are practically living on top of the garbage dump that is right next door

Health Disparities Linked with Economic Gaps

This is a typical home in the slums of Guatemala

This is a typical style of home in the wealthy areas of Guatemala

Health disparities are almost directly correlated with economic disparities within a country and between countries.  It is very common for health disparities to exist within a country when there are extreme gaps in wealth.    For example, Guatemala is a country in Central America and is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.  The distribution of income remains highly unequal with more than half of the population below the national poverty line and just over 400,000 (3.2%) unemployed. The CIA World Fact Book considers 56.2% of the population of Guatemala to be living in poverty.  Therefore, in this country there is extreme wealth and extreme poverty.  The wealthy people of the population can afford medical care which can prevent and treat diseases.   They also have the education necessary to live healthy lives.  The poorer areas do not have the means to provide their families with sanitation let alone having access to medical care and good education.  The government runs a number of public elementary and secondary-level schools. These schools are free, though the cost of uniforms, books, supplies, and transportation makes them less accessible to the poorer segments of society and significant numbers of poor children do not attend school. Many middle and upper-class children go to private schools.  This education availability or lack thereof increases the economic gap even further.

Since these economic gaps make a significant impact on health disparities around the world today, there have been successful interventions to aid this problem.  One of these interventions is Microfinance which is a banking system which allows people in poorer areas to receive loans in order to sustain a business and allows people the opportunity to get out of poverty and provide their families an education, which leads to better health.  Certain areas in India and Africa are places where this banking system has been the most successful.