Published in:
Open Access
01-04-2008
Surgery and Global Health: A View from Beyond the OR
Authors:
Paul E. Farmer, Jim Y. Kim
Published in:
World Journal of Surgery
|
Issue 4/2008
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Excerpt
In Africa, surgery may be thought of as the neglected stepchild of global public health. There are fewer physicians per population on this continent than on any other; surgeons are rarer still, and almost all of them work in the urban enclaves of what remains a rural region. The story is the same in the poorer parts of Asia and Latin America (with a few exceptions, such as Cuba). Although disease treatable by surgery remains a ranking killer of the world’s poor, major financers of public health have shown that they do not regard surgical disease as a priority even though, for example, more than 500,000 women die each year in childbirth; these deaths are largely attributable to an absence of surgical services and other means of stopping post-partum hemorrhage [
1]. Equally unattended, among the very poor, are motor-vehicle and farm accidents, peritonitis, long-bone fractures, and even blindness [
2-4]. Cardiac disease, congenital or the sequela of infection, is a death sentence for most people—many of them children—so afflicted in the poorest parts of the world [
5,
6]. In some settings, surveys reveal that surgical disease is among the top 15 causes of disability [
7], and surgical conditions account for up to 15% of total disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost worldwide [
8]. …