China’s growing contribution to health at home and on the global stage

 18-Nov-16, World Health Organization

The world’s most populous country used its steady economic growth to lift millions of its people out of poverty. The fact that the Millennium Development Goal for poverty reduction was met depended greatly on China’s achievement.

Image: China Topix

In reducing threats to health, some of China’s past achievements have been spectacular. Using medical doctors, barefoot doctors, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, health inspectors, and medical staff at factories, this vast and populous country eradicated smallpox two decades before the rest of the world. 

2016 marked another major milestone in the history of health reform: Health became an explicit national political priority with approval of the Healthy China 2030 plan by China’s Central Committee. But some formidable new threats have arrived. The challenges they pose, their costs to health and society, are big enough to stall or even reverse recent progress.

Population-wide increases in body weight are the warning signal that big trouble is on its way. It takes time, but trouble eventually arrives as a wave of lifestyle-related chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and some diet-related cancers.

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