Maori child health an “international scandal”
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Waatea news has reported that Innes Asher, professor of paediatrics at Auckland medical school and a world authority on child health, is describing the health of Maori children as an “international scandal”. Professor Asher says Maori kids and others from poor families are growing up in third world conditions similar to the worst slums in countries like Chile and India and the government is to blame New Zealand ranking at the top of OECD tables for preventable childhood diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, whooping cough, and rheumatic fever.
Maori have about double rates of most of those types of conditions but particularly higher rates of rheumatic fever and bronchiectasis which are both permanently disabling conditions of the lungs and the heart so children who get these conditions may die in young adulthood from lung or heart disease or have permanent injury and be unable to work. Appalling high rates by international standards, quite a disgraceful outcome by our country’s children
Presenting a keynote speech to the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) Quality Symposium last month Asher looked at the “triple jeopardy” of poor child health caused by the interplay of child poverty, poor housing and difficulty accessing primary health care services. One in every five children in New Zealand live in relative poverty (defined as living in households with less than 60% of the median income after housing costs). Almost one in four children live in families dependant on social welfare. No major media outlets have picked up this story, however, its hardly a new one. In her 2008 keynote speech to the Paediatric Society of New Zealand Annual Scientific Meeting Asher was saying similar things; “Our outcomes for child and youth health and safety are among the worst in the OECD. Large socioeconomic and ethnic disparities persist across a range of child health outcomes, and the underlying determinants of health are themselves unequally distributed” Decades of failed social and economic policies have created this situation, and it will take a lot to fix it.
