- Health in Sudan
Outside urban areas, little health care is available in
Sudan , helping account for a relatively low averagelife expectancy of 57 years and aninfant mortality rate of 69 deaths per 1,000 live births, low by standards in Middle Eastern but not African countries. For most of the period since independence in 1956, Sudan has experiencedcivil war , which has diverted resources to military use that otherwise might have gone into health care and training of professionals, many of whom have migrated in search of more gainful employment. In 1996 theWorld Health Organization estimated that there were only 9 doctors per 100,000 people, most of them in regions other than the South. Substantial percentages of the population lack access to safe water and sanitary facilities.Malnutrition is widespread outside the central Nile corridor because of population displacement from war and from recurrent droughts; these same factors together with a scarcity of medicines make diseases difficult to control. Child immunization against most major childhood diseases, however, had risen to approximately 60 percent by the late 1990s from very low rates in earlier decades. Spending on health care is quite low—only 1 percent ofgross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 (latest data). TheUnited Nations placed the rate of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS ) infection in late 2003 at 2.3 percent for adults, quite low by regional standards. The United Nations suggested, however, that the rate could be as high as 7.2 percent. Between 400,000 and 1.3 million adults and children were living with HIV, and AIDS deaths numbered 23,000. As of late 2004, some 4 million persons in the South had been internally displaced and more than 2 million had died or been killed as a result of two decades of war. Comparable figures forDarfur were 1.6 million displaced and 70,000 dead since fighting began there in early 2003. [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Sudan.pdf Sudan country profile] .Library of Congress Federal Research Division (December 2004). "This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain ."]References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.