Bridging the health divide

More information, better health?

Dr Sally Wyatt President, EASST and Associate Professor, ASCoR, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“The world today is divided between those who have access to health services and those who do not. A similar divide affects the flow of information and communications.”

Health Inter Network (HIN), a major WHO initiative launched by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in September 2000 aims to bring together international agencies, the private sector, foundations, non-governmental organizations and local or country partners to ensure equitable access to health information and to improve public health by facilitating the flow of health information, using the Internet. This is very laudable, and already, in order to address one aspect of the information gap, more than 2000 health and medical journals have been made available, free to countries with a per capita GNP of less than US$1000, and on a sliding scale for countries with a higher per capita GNP. In order to gain access to this wealth of information, eligible institutions need a computer connected to the Internet with a high-speed link, and therein lies just one of the problems implicit in this initiative. There is certainly a global digital divide.

We live in a world with massive inequalities in terms of access to new information and communication technologies including the Internet, as seen in Tables 1 and 2. At the simplest level of technical infrastructure, there is a very uneven geographical distribution of high speed links. In terms of use and access, high income OECD countries have 400 Internet users per 1000 people while South Asia has only 6.3 and sub-Saharan Africa has 7.8 users per 1000 people.

Interested? Read the complete article here.