Delivering Health Care to the Global Poor: Solving the Accessibility Problem

Each year, approximately 8.1 million children around the world die before they can celebrate their fifth birthday. 1 A child in a developing country is 33 times as likely to die before age five as a child in the industrialized world, and up to 60 percent of these deaths could be prevented through basic health education, products, and services, including low-cost treatments that are readily available in developed countries. 2 Adults are also dying of illnesses that have largely been eradicated in developed countries and could be prevented using low-cost interventions that are often available within the country, but are not accessible to those who need them, and not in sufficient amounts. n comparisons of industrialized and developing countries, the lack of financial resources partially accounts for the differential mortality rates. However, many prevention and treatment strategies for easily treatable conditions have been made available to developing countries by local and international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In 2007 alone, these entities provided