Public Health in New Guinea Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Public Health in New Guinea - Essay Example (Statistics from World Health Organization, 2009). Over the last 30 years very little has changed in New Guinea as far as increase in salary levels or a rise out of poverty. There are also many natural hazards to this country. Those include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, large-scale landslides, flooding, sporadic droughts, frosts in highland areas, the impact of climate variability and now rising sea levels. They have had almost every one of these occur over the last 5 years The state of the people's health is worse in New Guinea than any other Pacific region country. Communicable disease, including malaria and tuberculosis, remain the major cause of death. There is also a generalized epidemic of HIV/AIDs. Maternal and child morbidity rate are high I. It appears that the first thing that will need to happen is to set up a well run public health education system. I make this first due to the facts as presented above. New Guinea is very rural and travel is very limited so to assure that we are getting information to those that need it, we must educate groups in each area. In setting up this part of the plan, it is important to assure that we improve the literacy rate also. This will further our overall ability to improve health. II. Improve the rate of immunization. ... The problem here is getting the immunizations to the people but with the initial education of groups within areas, we would be able to improve this data. III. Hepatitis according to the WHO data runs in the thousands of patients. This problem is related to the conditions created by earthquakes and tsunamis to name a few. Of course we cannot decrease natural disasters but we can teach the people how to get and treat clean water as well as how to treat waste in such as way as to prevent some spread of these diseases. IV. Improve the availability of sterilizers. Much of the equipment that is needed, including surgery equipment is available now. The problem is that there are few and sometimes no sterilizers available in a given area. The people need to be taught to sterilize without the use of electricity as that is often not available in the rural areas. A campaign to get them sterilizers that operate on battery power would help tremendously here. V. National Policy regarding disposal. There is at present no national policy regarding the disposal of refuse, waste, medications, contaminated equipment or any other. This definitely needs to be part of the education process that takes place, as well as a policy developed and put into place. VI. HIV/AIDS education. 5% of the population has active aids at this point and that number is growing. There is an aids program that is active in the country but again, the country is so rural that most never get education or treatment. Set up district groups in this country seems to be the best way to handle this. VII. Drug Procurement-The country of New Guinea is a poor country. As stated before, they are listed as the most impoverished in the Pacific region. Treating disease is very difficult given the