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Millions are dying from treatable conditions worldwide because of poor access to surgery

by Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | April 27, 2015
Cardiology
Courtesy of The Lancet
Five billion people globally do not have access to safe and affordable surgery and anesthesia, and as a result, millions are dying from common, treatable conditions including appendicitis, fractures and obstructed labor, according to a new Commission published in The Lancet.

The Commission was put together by a group of 25 surgery and anesthesia experts and contributions from over 110 countries.

There are 313 million operations conducted every year and only one in 20 are done in the poorest countries even though over of a third of the world’s population is located in those regions. The Commission found that there is a worldwide shortage of 143 million procedures per year and some regions require almost twice as many additional procedures as others.

A little under a third of all deaths — 16.9 million — in 2010 were from conditions treatable with surgery, which exceeded the combined amount of deaths due to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Despite that alarming rate, until now surgery has been largely overlooked as a necessity for the world’s population.

“The global community cannot continue to ignore this problem—millions of people are already dying unnecessarily, and the need for equitable and affordable access to surgical services is projected to increase in the coming decades, as many of the worst affected countries face rising rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and road accidents,” Andy Leather, director of the King’s Centre for Global Health, King’s College London, UK, and one of the Commission’s lead authors, said in a statement.

The GE Foundation, philanthropic organization of GE, and its partners have been deploying programs for more than a decade to address this issue. The organization is providing the countries with sustainable biomedical equipment, technician training, anesthesia training for nurses, safe water solutions in health care facilities and oxygen production and delivery.

The Commission projected that a $420 billion investment could bring the surgery rates in the worst-off countries to acceptable levels by 2030. The authors believe that the investment has to go together with sustainable financing mechanisms across the health care system and a strong commitment to worldwide health coverage.

“Although the scale-up costs are large, the costs of inaction are higher, and will accumulate progressively with delay,” John Meara, the Commission’s lead author and Kletjian professor of global surgery at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement.

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