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AFRICA'S 'brain drain' jeopardises Aids fight
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07.16.04 (4 years ago)
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A "brain drain" of skilled nurses and doctors from Africa to better paid jobs abroad is jeopardising the global fight against Aids, a group of United States doctors said on Thursday.
The continent, at the epicentre of an HIV and Aids pandemic that has already killed 20 million people, needs to recruit tens of thousands of health care workers if it is to meet the goal of providing anti-Aids medicines to those who need them.
Yet its nurses and doctors are flocking to new jobs in developed countries, particularly Britain where the state-run National Health Service faces chronic staff shortages.
'Nurses and doctors are flocking to new jobs in developed countries'
"We have a terrible paradox, which is how can we possibly expect to meet the needs of people with Aids when the workforce is not only declining but the prospects for further decline are great," Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, told reporters.
In a report issued at the 15th International Aids Conference in Bangkok, Rubenstein called for restrictions on recruiting health care workers in sub-Saharan Africa and urged donor governments to fund improvements in local salaries.
In December 2003, the World Health Organisation (WHO) set a target to get anti-retroviral drugs to three million people in developing countries by the end of 2005. Only 440 000 receive them, including 150 000 in Africa.
The problem of diagnosing, treating and monitoring HIV patients in Africa has been a major theme of this week's Aids meeting and was highlighted in a speech by Randall Tobias, the US Global Aids Co-ordinator, on Wednesday.
"In places like Africa, the Caribbean and South-east Asia, there is a desperate lack of health care workers and infrastructure," he said.
"All the Aids drugs in the world won't do any good if they're stuck in warehouses with no place to go."
The scale of the problem is evident in countries like Malawi, where only 28 percent of nursing posts were filled in 2003, down from 47 percent in 1998, the government says.
South Africa, which has the world's highest number of sufferers, has vacancies for 32 000 nurses. In Zambia, only 50 of the 600 doctors who have been trained since independence in 1964 remain in the country.
Many of these English-speaking workers have headed for better careers and more pay in Britain, the United States, Canada
, Australia
and New Zealand
.
"They are leaving at a time when the plan that the WHO has adopted calls for massive increases in the health workforce, in some cases doubling, in some cases tripling, in some cases even quadrupling workforces," said Rubinstein.
Overall, more than three-quarters of countries in sub-Saharan Africa fall short of the WHO's minimum standard of 20 doctors per 100 000 people and 13 countries have five or fewer per 100 000.
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