Health in Addis Ababa

Every 3 years, the global public health community gathers for the World Congress on Public Health (WCPH). The 13th WCPH was held in Addis Ababa and the 14th will follow in Kolkata, India in 2015. I felt a little smug as this year will be Asia-Pacific Academic Consortium for Pub-lic Health’s (APACPH’s) 44th meeting, and so it was with interest I participated in our younger brother’s conference. But they outdo us in numbers and in the breadth of topics covered. Dr Luis Gomes Sambo, the World Health Organization Regional Director for Africa, stated that a billion poor around the world have not benefited from the health advances made in recent decades. There were 59 million deaths in 2008 of which 19 % occurred in Africa despite it having only 12 % of the population. In Africa, 69 % of the deaths were from infectious causes and 16% were from HIV. He spoke of the need to promote income and social equality to achieve better health and education outcomes. There will be a need for a threefold increase in health workers in Africa in the next decade, but caution needs to be exercised to ensure that Africa is not spending its scarce dollars on educating workers to migrate to the West. But as many speakers after him pointed out, it is important to continue our public health efforts while waiting for the politicians to achieve social equity. We need to be working on a water supply for every village instead o