Compiling the news headlines from around Australia for 6minutes every day can give you a pretty bleak view of what's happening in this country.
Day after day we hear about doctor shortages, treatment delays, hospital services being downgraded, increasing rates of obesity, diabetes and worrying levels of violence against doctors and others working in health roles. And if that’s not enough to get you down, try reading the weasel words and management gobbledegook from politicians and bureaucrats justifying why they can’t justify any more funding for sorely needed services but somehow have bags of money to spend on implementing yet more layers of red tape.
But as the saying goes, there’s always someone worse off than yourself. Browsing through the online news this week I came across a staggering statistic which seems to have barely made any impact on the world news. It was a report from Zimbabwe which mentioned almost as a footnote that the country now has almost two million people (out of a population of 12 million) infected with HIV. That figure includes about 400 000 children with HIV through mother-to-child transmission. In the absence of treatment, half he children born with HIV die before they are two years old.
And yet only 5000 people are able to access antiretroviral treatment. When you read on, the picture just gets worse. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen dramatically, from 60 for males in 1990 to 37 now - the lowest in the world. Life expectancy for females is even lower at 34 years. Infant mortality rates have climbed to 81 deaths per 1,000 live births in the same period.
The country is in economic meltdown, the currency is worthless, crop failures are causing widespread infant malnutrition and the country is run by a murderous president-for-life seemingly for the benefit of his political cronies. This recent report (link ) on health services in Zimbabwe makes for sobering reading.
What did the people of Zimbabwe do to deserve this? Without getting into the politics of the whole situation, I can only say thank goodness I live in Australia. The news here doesn’t seem so bad after all.
