Word: mainlanders
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...pressing question at a time when China's entire rural health-care system is under threat from SARS and is failing after decades of government neglect. While residents of the mainland's wealthier cities enjoy decent medical care, the network of doctors, clinics and hospitals serving the rural poor are simply unavailable to huge swaths of the population. Preventable scourges like tuberculosis and hepatitis B ravage the countryside, infant mortality is creeping upward after decades in decline?and now, with millions of migrant workers leaving their jobs in cities and streaming back to the hinterlands to escape SARS, it seems...
...Before economic reforms began to chip away at the communist system 20 years ago, medical treatment in the mainland?while often rudimentary?was widely available to its all citizens. China's famed "barefoot doctors," usually middle school graduates trained in first aid, hiked through hamlets offering prenatal examinations and setting broken limbs. The service, essentially free, helped to almost eradicate sexually transmitted diseases in China and nearly doubled the country's life expectancy from 35 to 65 between 1949 to the mid-1970s. But in the early 1980s, the mainland began shifting from communism to capitalism, and peasants...
...through vigilant monitoring of its victims. Though TB has been all but eliminated in developed countries, it still afflicts 1.5 million mostly rural Chinese each year, an infection rate second only to India's. The World Bank recently concluded a decade-long project providing free TB treatment in 13 mainland provinces. It was a stunning success?incidence of the disease fell by 36%. But provincial governments ultimately treated the project as charity. They stiffed the program of a third of the matching funds they were supposed to contribute?in Heilongjiang province, "the special fund for tuberculosis control was allocated...
...unchecked epidemic on the mainland is a nightmarish prospect. Vietnam, Hong Kong and Toronto have, to varying degrees, reined in their SARS outbreaks, and life is slowly returning to normal there. But the disease still rages in the world's most populous country, posing not just a health threat but also a hazard to the economy and social stability. Containing the epidemic is just one of the government's challenges. Another is modulating public perception of how well its leaders are handling the fight against SARS. The stage is set for a massive political realignment, with the fate of China...
...With the mainland's SARS epidemic still untamed?Heymann says "China will make or break this outbreak"?it's too early to celebrate. But after weeks of rising death tolls and plunging economies, a little good news is welcome. "(It's) very encouraging," says Dr. Ali Kahn, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official seconded to Singapore. "But does that mean it's over? Absolutely...