Topic: Managing Secondary Effects of Disease Outbreaks
Country: China
Delegate Name: Madison VanNatter
School: Kalamazoo Central High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All China position papers GLIMUN 2016 committees
Over the course of thousands of years, China had dealt with many disease outbreaks and their effect on the people of China. There are several of disease outbreaks year after year. Some current outbreaks include the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015 and the rise of the Zika virus in 2015 until currently. Infectious disease outbreaks affect millions of people’s health per year and affect their way of life.
We the people China have developed many programs in place to deal with serious outbreaks that do occur. China’s use of barefoot doctors,farmers who received minimal basic medical and paramedical training and worked in rural villages in the People's Republic of China, brought healthcare to rural areas where urban-trained doctors would not settle. This prompted basic hygiene, preventive health care, and family planning, treated common illnesses and was the easiest form of healthcare access. We also used public health campaigns to improve environmental and hygienic conditions. We saw major improvement life expectancy which has almost doubled and infant mortality has been slashed from 250 deaths to 40 deaths for every 1000 live births. In addition to this, the malaria rate has dropped from 5.55% of the entire Chinese population to 0.3% of the population. This increase in health has been from the efforts of both the Chinese government as a whole and also at a local, community efforts to increase good health.The Chinese government recently declared the pursuit of “Healthy China 2020,” a program to provide universal healthcare access and treatment for all of China by the year 2020, doing so through revised policies in nutrition, agriculture, food, and social marketing.
As China we believe that the best thing for other countries to do it to take up a similar plan as our “Healthy China 2020” to improve the quality of life for its people. By following our well thought out plan any country should see a major increase in public health and help bring prosperity to its people as Cuba did when they took to implementing our rural policies.
