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Monday, July 23, 2001
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Thirty years ago, Kabul had some excellent hospitals. I studied heart surgery in one of them in the early 1970s.
Now, they are mostly crowded and chaotic dormitories for the sick, in which a few brave and selfless physicians sometimes accomplish near-miracles with very limited resources.
The Wazir Muhammad Akbar Khan Hospital, a 250-bed acute care facility that serves people for 100 miles around, is a multistory building crammed with patients and their attendants, many lying in string cots brought from home and on quilts on the floor.
Doctors -- all doctors, regardless of their training and experience -- are paid the equivalent of $100 a month in the notoriously shaky and increasingly worthless Afghan rupee. They supplement their meager salaries by seeing patients in their homes or makeshift one-room clinics.
Health care in Afghanistan has reached rock bottom even by Third World standards. Infant mortality is 18 percent; one-fourth of children never live to see their 5th birthday.
Life expectancy is just 44 years of age -- one of the lowest in the world. Even other developing countries average 61 years, compared to the mid-70s for the industrial West. Two-thirds of the population has no access to health care at all.
The Taliban aren't responsible for this crisis; they inherited it from years of civil war and anarchy. But they have apparently done little to improve things.
-- S. Amjad Hussain