Public health in China

Good health is a fundamental goal of people throughout the world ,and the Chinese people are no exception. Life expectancy was 45 before 1949.Now an average Chinese is expected to live to be 69.The infant mortality rate for the whole country fell from 200 per 1,000 in 1949 to less than 10per 1,000.All this is due to the improvements in medical care and living standards of the Chinese people.

Prevention always comes first. The Chinese government and people have time and again launched nationwide Patriotic Public Sanitation Campaigns, and epidemics have been brought under control. Medical treatment has also been improved By the end of 1993,there were 2,795,000 hospital beds in the country and 4,117,000 full time health workers Besides numerous hospitals at provincial, city and county levels, there is a clinic in every factory, every school and every community with doctors and nurses on hand to help.

Medical care available the Chinese is changing today. Currently, government employees enjoy free medical care; they are teachers, doctors, factory workers, office workers, and army men. Others have to buy in insurance to help then meet medical expenses. Still others are covered by group health plans paid jointly by the worker, the employer ,and the local government.

Problems in medical care stem partly from is so that diagnosis and treatment are sometimes hurried. There is a long way to go before all the Chinese people are covered by a satisfactory health plan.

In the past years, great progress has been made in promoting traditional Chinese medicine and combining it with Western medicine. Chinese medicine has its own system of theories, therapeutic principles and methods of treatment. Efforts to study and explain them in a modern approach and in connection with clinical experience have led to new successes; In acupuncture and moxibustion , for example, a number of new acupuncture points and new methods have been discovered so that more than 300 types of ailments can be treated now,100 of which with good or very good results including coronary heart disease ,acute bacterial dysentery, gall stones, and neural paralysis.

Public health means more than medical care. The Ministry of Public Health of China has launched many campaigns to raise the level of China's public health. Some of those campaigns aim to improve public sanitation and medical services in the rural areas and in the remote border regions to fight against increasingly serious environmental pollution, to ban smoking in certain places, and to lay down requirements and standards for food processing. Naturally the list seems endless.