BEIJING: When the news came on November 23 that absolute poverty had been eradicated in China with the nine last-mile impoverished counties almost tripling their income from the national poverty line, there was a sense of achievement in the country. As for me, I have a personal angle in this.
You see, these nine counties are in Guizhou, the province in southwest China that struggled with the largest indigent population. I was scheduled to go there in October as part of a team to look at the remarkable institutions and individuals there that had helped ferry over 9 million people in the province to stable incomes since 2012.
One of our destinations was the Jishikang Hospital, a private healthcare institution in a once deeply impoverished village. I was told it gets patients from other provinces as well.
Besides jobs, education and infrastructure, medical care has been a critical element in the fight on poverty. An article in the London-based International Journal for Equity in Health by three Chinese authors in March gave a succinct outline of the link between illness and poverty.
“Poverty and ill-health are generally believed to have a bidirectional causality relationship, and poverty-led diseases disproportionately affect extremely poor populations and contribute to a vicious cycle of poverty because of decreased productivity led by long-term illness and disability,” stated the article, Health, Income and Poverty: Evidence From China’s Rural Household Survey.
It was based on a survey of over 29,000 poor households in rural areas, which found 51.63 percent of the respondents attributed their poverty to illnesses suffered by one or more household members. Over 60 percent of the households had at least one patient and more than 25 percent with ill members could not afford expensive medical expenses.
The authors attributed most rural illnesses to living in “unhealthy environments without decent shelter, clean water or adequate sanitation… lack of competent medical personnel in poor communities…and low-quality care.”
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
